Pros and cons of rewriting an OS from scratch

Rewrite: Could RISC OS be sensibly recreated from scratch?

Several attempts at rewriting RISC OS from scratch to implement modern operating system features have been made by people since the break up of Acorn, yet apart from recent QEMU work, no such projects have come close.

In an article published today on OSNews, the merits and pitfalls of re-creating operating systems from scratch were debated, with references made to OSes including RISC OS and AmigaOS.

The ideal albeit seemingly impossible goal of rewriting RISC OS from scratch would be to introduce features such as full memory protection, full pre-emptive multitasking, proper disc and filesystem caching, compatibility with drivers and applications from other OSes, and so on, all while maintaining the RISC OS API so that existing applications can continue to work, possibly within a compatibility environment.

While some have in the past proposed rebuilding the OS from the ground up, recent work on QEMU has taken a different approach - this has seen the implementation of parts of the RISC OS API within an ARM emulator, allowing native ARM-targeted programs to run on Intel PCs.

See the link below for more.

Links
A critical look at OS re-creation projects
Also, Rewriting RISC OS for Intel PCs from last August

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