How much of an operating system could be written in, say, Python? [closed]

Answer 1

See Genera / OpenGenera for an example of an OS written in Lisp that was actually in use for quite a while on LispMachines.
Haskell has House.

Answer 2

It's difficult to imagine kernels / device drivers etc written in (e.g. Python) - the memory management would be a bit of a headache.

On the other hand, almost all the userspace code could be. Under Linux, there is no requirement that "init" be a native machine-code binary - it can be a python script or something, no problem.

Answer 3

House - Haskell User's Operating System and Environment. It is even bootable inside VM and you could play with it.

Sources are very readable, IMO.

Answer 4

As long as the programming language has the ability to manipulate binary files, you could write a complete OS in the particular language. This is not to say that it is easy, or practical. It just makes sense that, if your chosen language can manipulate binary, then you can go as low-level as you need.

Answer 5

Beyond the kernel (and by this, I mean kernel, microkernel style), and something to compile the runtimes for each of said dynamic languages, just about anything and everything COULD be if you were building your own operating system. It's just not practical. Heck, init.d is written primarily in sh as far as I'm aware. But sh, while not powerful, is VERY lightweight and as far as I know, efficient in what it does. Higher level languages like Python, Perl, etc, could handle it fine, but it'd be alot slower, and would take alot more memory for instances of interpreters.

It's possible, it's just not practical.