News (last updated Apr 3). Uring IPC, Async DMA, ext2, Text Shaping, and Compositing!

Mancini API Reference

What It Means

mazarin now has uring-based IPC with dedicated reader threads per shepherd, replacing the mailbox system and its scheduling stalls. Block I/O is async with DMA clumps and shared-memory completion rings (500x faster). The window manager (rachel) composites z-ordered backing stores with bbox-scoped rasterization. Text is shaped via HarfBuzz with glyph caches in shared memory. The data disk is ext2, with a 128MB off-heap ramdisk at /tmp. The constraint VM gained filtered queries, collection builders, and damage-rectangle propagation for incremental redraws.

Quick Start: build and run mazarin

mazarin, what this is

mazarin is a go-centric and indeed go-only operating system. (mazarin is not capitalized.) In the future mazarin may support languages like Javascript or Python for which interpreters written in go are available. Similarly, programs in Webassembly format may be supported for some compiled languages as there are Webassembly virtual machines written in go. Support for languages other than go is possible, but not a priority.

mazarin, what this is not

mazarin is not unix. mazarin does not argue that everything should be a file–it argues that everything is part of the UI. mazarin is not byte streams which work by read/write/open/close and file descriptors. If that is what you want, I suggest you try Linux; it is quite good. mazarin may offer some compatibility with Linux in an effort to accelerate support for features that are important to mazarin, but the compatibilty is not the goal.

mazarin, what this is

mazarin’s model is that everything is part of the UI. The UI is not only the most important thing in mazarin, but it is nearly the only thing. The UI of mazarin does not offer the programming model of any existing window system.

No C

mazarin does no use C code at all–nor cgo. go or go assembly is used in the build and boot processes. All the tools for building mazarin are written in go. The boot process uses bootloaders written in go for x8664 and arm64. If you want to get _pedantic, you could argue that the code before the bootloaders–such as firmware on x86_64 and DTB construction on arm64– is written in C, but this is far from mazarin’s concern.

I come to bury C, not to praise it. I harbor no ill-will towards C code, it can be highly useful and, with a strong linter, fairly clean and straightforward. I have partly built Mazarin to show you dont need C anymore. The world has changed a great deal since C’s debut in the 1970s.

mazarin, what this is

mazarin runs on bare metal and has a go-centric programming model. It is not just that the code is written go, it is that it does not offer the c/unix programming model. Most of programming model is focused on channels and goroutines. mazarin runs on paravirtualized hardware via a hypervisor but a middle-term goal is to run on a Raspberry Pi W zero version 2.

mazarin, what this is not

mazarin is not optimized. Linux has been being optimized for the last 25 years and that continues today. Linux’s performance is truly astonishing–but performance is not currently an area of focus for mazarin.

mazarin, what this is and what this is not

mazarin was written by AI. I have written precisely zero lines of code in this repository. I have written some of the documentation, such as this file, because what it communicates is too important to allow an AI to write it. (This may be human pride at work.) You may have concerns that the AI may have put code with intended or unintended security flaws in mazarin. You are wise to have have such concerns. I would recommend that you only run this code under a hypervisor that you have confidence in.

Honey, look! I vibecoded an operating system!