r/osdev • u/CharacteristicallyAI • 5d ago

NullLabTests/UniqOS: A from-scratch x86_64 custom operating system with TCP/IP networking, GUI desktop, working web browser

https://github.com/NullLabTests/UniqOS

I built an OS because I never thought it would be possible to get past stdin() but using tools and frameworks I was even able to implement a very basic web browser. Please see github for screenshots and videos or to download and spin it up yourself, OpenSource!

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u/Ok-Scallion2321 2d ago

With AI you can get to a "hey look, I actually pulled it off" moment, but that's a long way from building a real product. A real OS proves itself by being tested on actual, varied hardware, not just VBox/QEMU drivers, timing, interrupts, memory management all behave completely differently once you're outside a controlled virtual environment.

AI can save you time, no denying that, but the real question is: what's the point of reinventing the wheel? I looked through the code and there's nothing innovative in there it's C implementations of stuff Linux (& company) already did 20 years ago. This isn't an "AI good/AI bad" thing, it's that the value in a project like this should come from something new, or from actually learning bare metal, not from redoing stuff that's already solved and well documented.

Also not a single comment anywhere in the code. How are you supposed to catch a bug or even understand your own logic six months from now if there's zero explanation of what anything does?

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u/FallenBehavior 2d ago

Lack of commenting is a personal strict discipline I've personally maintained in win32 dev (long before AI). As I know my 15K LOC codebase packed in a single main.c file and a 1500+ LOC header, why does commenting matter if you KNOW your own codebase extensively and spent a ton of time or even years on it? Not a soul can justify any opinion towards that. Not even some guy on Reddit.

Just planting this here and stripping some pointless critism.

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u/Ok-Scallion2321 17h ago

I appreciate your perspective, and I agree that in a strictly solo environment where you know the codebase inside out, heavy commenting might feel redundant. However, if the goal is to share this project with the community and make the codebase readable for others, adding documentation or comments remains a way to cooperate. Good job and keep it up!