Well hello friends! Today we celebrate the 4th birthday of SerenityOS, counting from the first commit to the repository, on October 10th, 2018.
What follows is a selection of random highlights from the past year, mixed with personal reflections from some of the SerenityOS developers.
SerenityOS is a from-scratch desktop operating system that combines a Unix-like core with the look&feel of 1990s productivity software.
The project scope goes all the way from kernel to web browser, and we aim to build everything in-house instead of relying on third-party libraries.
My name is Andreas Kling, and I started building this system after finishing a 3-month rehabilitation program for drug addiction in 2018. I found myself with a lot of time and nothing to spend it on. So I began building something I'd always wanted to build: my very own dream OS.
A lot has happened since then, and today SerenityOS is a bustling open source community with hundreds of developers from around the world.
In last year's post, we had passed 500 contributors on GitHub. At the time of writing this one, we're up to 765!
The SerenityOS Discord server, which we created in April of last year, has grown even more, now housing a staggering 6929 members!
We're always welcoming new people into the community, and it's great to see that our general development model keeps scaling.
While there are still some stability issues, multi-core (SMP) support in the SerenityOS Kernel has made great strides in the last year.
There's an ongoing effort to rid ourselves of the big process lock,
as well as adopting the SpinlockProtected<T> and
MutexProtected<T> patterns for fool-proof protection
of shared data.
Recently, I've been recording my monthly update videos in SMP mode. This definitely wasn't possible a year ago!
I was invited to do a demo of SerenityOS for the Handmade Seattle conference. It was a hybrid conference, and my demo was pre-recorded.
Preparing the demo was surprisingly challenging, as I only had a 5 minute time slot to work with. I managed to cram in quite a lot in the end, and the demo was well received!
While the SerenityOS kernel and command-line had been multi-user friendly from the beginning, our GUI wasn't until this year.
With the introduction of a LoginServer service and a redesign of service sockets, the system can now support per-user desktop sessions.
main() function
In 2021 we began using value-based exceptions (ErrorOr<T>) in SerenityOS.
Together with our TRY() and MUST() macros, it provides a convenient
way to propagate (or terminate on) errors with minimal overhead.
However, the main() function in every program was often quite messy, as it had
nowhere to propagate errors to, and thus wasn't able to use TRY().
The solution came in the form of a new main function: serenity_main(), which
returns an ErrorOr<int>.
Like many things, the initial implementation was captured on video on my YouTube channel.
"In this past year, I've been amazed at the steady growth of SerenityOS in terms of its community, the quality of the system itself and the amount of new features and bugfixes coming in. I feel very lucky experiencing this from a front row seat, and I'm confident that a lot of people are going to look back at this time with great fondness.
For me personally, it meant transitioning from having very basic C++ experience and no OS development experience whatsoever, into someone who is still very inexperienced at C++ and OS development but can now say they have replaced the SB16 audio driver by a brand new AC'97 driver, worked on a lot of ports, fixed all kinds of issues in userland and the kernel, and had a large contribution to the OpenGL library and accompanying software rasterizer. For the latter two, an ad-hoc team consisting of primarily myself, Stephan and Jesse materialized and I've had great fun discussing all the peculiarities of OpenGL with them, all in order for specific pixels to obtain a more pleasant color.
As long as everyone keeps doing what they like, the next year can only get better :^)"
Both of us have been using the CLion IDE from JetBrains for quite a while now, and the folks at JetBrains were curious to learn more about our project. Linus and I spoke with them about our use of bleeding-edge C++, CLion, and more.
Speaking of interviews, I did a video interview with Brian Gianforcaro, a long-time SerenityOS developer and project maintainer.
Brian has done a ton of work around the system and is especially interested in system stability and security.
It's always fun to learn more about the people working on SerenityOS, and I had a great time chatting with Brian!
LibJS was an early implementor of the new Temporal proposal for ECMAScript. In fact, we had most of the API up and running before some other engines had even started working on it. :^)
Linus wrote a nice blog post about the Temporal implementation in LibJS.
One of my favorite things this year is that Linus Groh made a YouTube channel! He's been posting videos where he works on various SerenityOS components, including LibJS, LibWeb, Kernel, our Ports system, and others.
Make sure you #SubscribeToLinus for more SerenityOS related content!
This year, SerenityOS appeared in the local media in Sweden (where I'm from) for the first time. I did an interview with the newspaper Ny Teknik (in Swedish) where we talked about the project, my background, etc.
This led to a bunch of people contacting my parents to ask about SerenityOS, which was surreal but pretty funny.
Back in 2020, international programming language nerd JT started the Systems with JT channel on YouTube, and one of the very first videos was an enthusiastic little review of SerenityOS. This led to us becoming friends (and eventually creating a programming language together).
Potentially creating a new tradition, JT took a new look at SerenityOS for Christmas 2021.
In the last year, we've seen a number of classic 3D games for the PC get ported to SerenityOS. They're running on top of LibGL, which is our implementation of the OpenGL API. Rendering is done by LibSoftGPU, a software rasterizer that uses SIMD if available.
It was a great personal highlight to play Half-Life on SerenityOS, a game I grew up with an put countless hours into as a kid. :^)
Here's an early recording of the classic intro sequence when it first got up and running on our OpenGL implementation.
While SerenityOS leans heavily on the classic 90s desktop paradigm, we also like to "backport" good UX inventions from recent years.
One such backport is our new GUI command palette, which exposes all the available GUI actions in the current context as a keyboard-friendly command-line interface with fuzzy search.
Thanks to the tight vertical integration with everything using the same GUI libraries, it's instantly available in all applications on the system.
This year, we ran a handful of "community showcases" on my YouTube channel, where volunteering community members sent in little videos describing and/or showing something they were working on.
It was super fun to look at SerenityOS development from new perspectives (and I loved seeing the faces of people I chat with all the time!)
In May, we introduced a new systems language to the project. While C++ has gotten us very far, it doesn't look like it'll ever get us to memory safety.
To ensure that SerenityOS remains useful and fun to work on for many years to come, I decided to explore the adoption of a new systems language for the project. After spending a few weeks prototyping in a number of languages, I had to admit that none of them were a great fit for the project.
So instead we're making our own language, to ensure that we get a perfect fit! For most projects, this might be a questionable decision. For us, it's just one more component in a stack where we already build everything ourselves. :^)
The original Jakt prototype was written in Rust by myself and JT over a couple of weeks before we made it public. I wrote a post introducing Jakt and the motivations behind it. And JT made a video about the creation of Jakt as well. The Rust-based compiler is now long-gone, and Jakt is fully self-hosted with the Jakt compiler being written in Jakt itself.
We have yet to introduce Jakt in the SerenityOS codebase, as we wanted to let the language mature a bit before adding it as a dependency. Things have been maturing rapidly though, and it's only a matter of time before this happens.
One highlight for me is seeing new contributors dive into areas of the project that nobody else was interested in before. This year, a small handful of people have done a huge amount of work on adding emoji. We've gone from having only a few of them, to over 62% coverage according to the emoji.serenityos.net website Xexxa set up. It's especially satisfying to see pull requests featuring emoji that my OS doesn't even support yet. :^)
Similarly with the new Jakt language, a lot of rapid progress has been made by people who had not written any code for SerenityOS before.
And of course, I have to mention MacDue's terrific work on graphical effects in LibWeb. Gradients, shadows, anti-aliasing, filters... It's great to see the web engine maturing and looking more and more like a "real" web browser. :^)
With all our powers combined, we produce some very impressive stuff. I can't wait to see what the next year holds!
I finally got to implement something I wanted to do in WebKit for years, but never got around to: a fully garbage-collected DOM in our web engine.
The LibWeb engine now uses the LibJS garbage collector for more than just JavaScript objects. Many of the web platform objects have their lifetime managed by the garbage collector as well.
This makes it much easier to implement some of the more intricate object models in the HTML specification family (without dealing with reference cycles and huge graphs with strong/weak pointers left and right.)
We've now conquered both the Acid1 and Acid3 browser tests. (Acid2 still has a small number of failures.)
These are old tests, but they still cover a lot of things that any serious browser must support, so it's a no-brainer that we need to pass them.
Our Acid3 success was covered in this article on The Register.
This year, our browser engine stack has taken a major new step: becoming cross-platform!
Ladybird started as a humble Linux GUI for debugging LibWeb and LibJS, but has now become its own cross-platform browser project. The GUI is still pretty basic, but the underpinnings are maturing.
While things are changing rapidly, we've already seen proofs-of-concept with the browser running on Linux, macOS, Android, FreeBSD, Haiku and Windows (WSL).
I wrote a blog post about Ladybird with some basic details.
You can also watch the video where I make the initial Qt GUI for Ladybird.
There's also been a number of articles in the German news about Ladybird. In fact, there was so much coverage that one commenter insinuated that I must be the "husband of the boss's daughter" at heise online. :^)
I'm very excited about the way the SerenityOS project has been
heading this past year! My favorite aspect is seeing our code
running on many different platforms via Jakt and Ladybird.
These projects have not only proven that our work holds up in
the "real world", but have also brought so many awesome new
members into our community. They also tied in to key
improvements like the wider use of idiomatic C++ platform
abstractions (via the Core::System family of functions).
My fears that the new projects would stop development on the core OS were unfounded. I'm inspired by how quickly the community's joint effort achieved large objectives like increasing Unicode and emoji coverage in our fonts, moving syscalls off of the process lock, and porting our apps to LibMain. It was great to see so many people pitching in to help.
This year has been super fruitful, and I can't wait to see what the next one has in store!
Now that I look back on our fourth year, I see that it's been one of forward-looking decisions and expansions.
It took us a few years to become truly comfortable with the vast scope and timeline of the SerenityOS project, but now that we have, two new frontiers can be opened up: a systems language & a cross-platform browser.
To all the awesome people who have participated in the last year, whether by writing code, filing bug reports, adding documentation, drawing emojis, watching my videos, sending letters, hanging out on Discord, coming to the livestreams, telling your friends about SerenityOS, etc, thank you all!
I'm so incredibly grateful for all the love and support this project receives!
And also, a massive thank you! to everyone who has supported me financially. Thanks to you, I'm able to work on this full time, and I'm excited to see where we can push this project!
Andreas Kling, 2022-10-10
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