News (last updated Apr 28). Go-linker plugins, Mail client, Full-text search, Go 1.26.2, and File-backed mmap!
Mancini API Reference
What It Means
mazarin now has its own patched Go linker that emits relocatable .maz
plugins without ever falling back to the system linker – every
shepherd in startup.toml is loaded by a single generic
/shepherd.elf host via a runtime loader called mazdl. There is a
working email client backed by a maildb shepherd (BadgerDB +
mbox import) and an fti shepherd (full-text search via bleve). The
toolchain is on Go 1.26.2. MAP_SHARED writable mmap is supported
with dirty-page write-back to ext2 on munmap and shepherd death –
which is what makes BadgerDB and bleve usable. Rachel (the window
manager) gained focused/unfocused title bars, click-drag window moves
with screen clipping, and alpha-composited drag previews. Sadly, we
also removed RISC-V support – see the news page for details.
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!