SwiftOS – an OS built with and for Swift

I am currently working on an OS called SwiftOS. As the name implies, it will be centered around the programming language Swift, with a deep integration.

Right now I’m mainly researching on the actual OS development itself, I already am very familiar with both Assembly and C for the low-level code. I’m also looking for introductory and practical books on OS development.

The motivation behind SwiftOS is mainly a love for Swift, it has many qualities that other languages don’t feature. The code is also very readable and maintainable. Even though Swift is able to run on most systems (even FreeBSD support was added in a recent update), there is no OS yet that both uses Swift in the actual OS code and has first-class, fully native Swift integration out of the box.

SwiftOS will feature a shell called swsh (short for Swift Shell) where both Swift and standard UNIX shell commands can be mixed for an extremely powerful scripting environment. For example:

% ls("/tmp") // commands are functions bts
% ls /tmp    # This is also possible (classic shell style)
% await download("https://apple.com") | save("/tmp/site.html") // await on a whole new level

Additionally, writing an OS is a big challenge and will expand my knowledge.

My main challenge is the seeming lack of introductory books, however, I will take a deep dive into both the open source kernel of macOS and other OS projects.

Some of my next steps will be, as partly mentioned before:

• Searching for more introductory books
  • Books I already read/am reading:
    • Programming with 64-bit ARM Assembly Language by Stephen Smith
    • Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces
• Explore macOS internals
• Look at other open source OSs