Thanks. I want to keep the software simple while having proper support for the graphics and audio hardware. I already have some prototype software written is RISC-V asm. I’ll probably use lua as the first high-level language, as it has a small code base and runs well on memory-constrained systems.
I’m not yet sure what features the OS will offer; it partly depends on interrupts and whether I support virtual memory. But I’m not trying to create another UNIX; there are plenty of those already. However, the system will be modern, e.g. using UTF-8 encoding.
Load-store architecture is a defining quality of RISC in general and RISC-V in particular. If you're used to a rich set of addressing modes in x86 or 68K, coding on RISC-V asm is a bit of a shock, but I'm definitely warming to it.
Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld worked for Radius on the Full Page Display. How different would Apple have been if it had held onto more of the original Macintosh team in the mid-80s?
68000 is, in many ways, the pinnacle of assembler for programming, but RISC-V is pretty fun, too. I hope RISC-V tempts a few more people to try asm programming (again).
I’m not yet sure what features the OS will offer; it partly depends on interrupts and whether I support virtual memory. But I’m not trying to create another UNIX; there are plenty of those already. However, the system will be modern, e.g. using UTF-8 encoding.