Much to my surprise, Kinetic was linked to from the Programming sub-Reddit today.

In the past couple of days, Kinetic has suddenly drawn some attention. The feedback has been encouraging, but a few themes have come up in the questions people have asked. So here’s a few comments that might clear things up a bit:

I hadn’t really intended for Kinetic to get much review; I had created the website merely so my friends could see what I was up to. In other words, the statements aren’t meant to be taken too seriously: this isn’t an academic journal, it’s a personal website. Kinetic uses the Foreign Function Interface to interact with C++ and Assembler. In general, the FFI enables pointer arithmetic, and is therefore able to subvert type safety. I haven’t yet come up with a better way for addressing a graphics adapter’s linear frame buffer. I’m sincerely interested in suggestions for how to deal with that. Nope, I haven’t posted any code yet. I’m not opposed to the idea of releasing snapshots in the future, when things are a bit more mature. There has been speculation as to how much of the operating system is written in Haskell. Here’s a rough breakdown. C++: Stuff for initializing the IDT and GDT, some bitmap routines (for performance), the FreeType library, as well as basic functions for supporting the GHC runtime. Haskell: PCI driver, mouse and keyboard driver, VMWare graphics adapter driver, most of the GUI.

Hope that helps to clarify a few things.