The Mu computer seems to be making its way fully off third-party operating systems. Here's a demo of some (fairly barebones by the standards of previous demos) operations of the live-updating postfix shell. https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-shell-20210214 If you're curious about the sources, start browsing at http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/shell/line.mu.html. The architecture is much cleaner than the prototype I was working with before. Functions contain lines, lines contain words, words contain gap buffers. Rendering a thing renders its constituent things. Render takes a top-left coordinate and returns a bottom-right coordinate. Each thing knows which constituent thing has its cursor, shows its cursor when rendering, redirects keystrokes to it as they come in. That's the positive. On the negative side, my experience working with bare metal leads me to despair of ever getting a disk or network. I spent 3 weeks at the start of the year struggling to support a mouse before I gave up. I gave up not because it's impossible to build (I was almost there) but because it's impossible to explain to anyone, at least with my current level of development. There's just too much historical accident in dealing with ancient PS/2 hardware that modern systems continue to pretend to be. And PS/2 was supposed to be easy. At least there's a single lowest-common-denominator way all devices work. With disk and network even that disappears. You need to support umpteen devices. Which means anybody hacking on their own computer now will encounter hardware their computer doesn't have, and which they shouldn't have to care about. In other words, going down this road seems to lead only to where we already are. So I've been thinking about what's next. The thought of giving up on Mu has crossed my mind. It may yet happen. When I started Mu I had programs I wanted to write. It was always a means to an end. Lately I can't remember what they were, and the projects I recall seem obsolete, overtaken by events. There does seem to be one niche where one can write interesting programs about the world without needing to actually, you know, talk to the world over HTTP. That niche is simulation. Building computational models. And it might even be particularly important to the world in the next few years, given the volatility and turmoil I see all around me. As a baby step, here's Conway's Game of Life in Mu without an operating system: https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-life-2021-02-13. Sources: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/life.mu.html. For a while I used to implement Life in every new language I learned. Not sure how or why I stopped.