alt Hacker NewsDo you have any plans (maybe in the far future) to re-implement the Photon microGUI system?
Just asking because for me, that's half of what made QNX so great back in the day. Even today I keep raving about that 1.44MB demo floppy, about how polished, performant and efficient Photon was.
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I contacted the QNX community relations manager a little time ago and (if I remember correctly) they said they weren't going to release any of the microGUI source as they wanted the community to focus on their current projects. Very saddening that all that useful historical source code is being left to rot.
Well.. who knows. My interests are not exactly in the area of GUIs, but I do agree that Photon was great. When the main system stabilizes; when it runs RT tests (such as the audio test I'm planning) under heavy load for e.g. one week -- AND when all important "syscall-like" APIs are implemented and proven to be correct -- I might return to this.
Question to you: on which hardware platform would you like to have Photon running?
Currently, the only system I got is SiFive Unmatched with NVidia GK-208 card. Re-using Nouveau in QSOE should be possible, but it's a big pile of work.
For QNX/Blackberry it would make sense to opensource Photon since they are not using it anymore. Porting it to the modern QNX and other systems would be great.
If anyone knows where to find a legitimate MIPS version of Photon, I’d be interested in starting a decomp project.
I wonder if we couldn't just use LLMs to completely reverse engineer a QNX 4.25 demo image into usable source code. Possibly translate it directly into rust code.
Bun had it easier in many ways, given that they're based on a well-documented public API surface & have the node.js test suite etc.
In the case of QNX I'm guessing it might help to find a way to intercept the message passing of running QNX instances in order to use it as a test harness while reverse engineering all the components.