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Crazierl

An Erlang Operating System

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Crazierl is an experimental/hobby operating system based around BEAM.I've linked the browser based demo; I don’t recommend using a phone; it does work, slowly, on the phones I tested, but it’s very awkward to use. You can share a link with a hashtag with your friends and click the consent checkbox, and it (should) link up into dist and I’ve also included a chat application you can start with chat:start(). (quit chat with /quit, or use the shell menu with ctrl-g to switch between shells etc).The browser demo relies on the v86 javascript x86 virtual machine. You can also run Crazierl on a real x86 system, but I’ve had mixed luck on modern systems, it uses some esoteric legacy VGA features and support for that isn’t getting better.Crazierl is fairly limited: 32-bit x86, BIOS boot, only two NIC drivers virtio-net and realtek 8168. But it's got enough to become part of an Erlang dist cluster. It also supports SMP, but it’s crashy with high core counts in qemu; there’s almost certainly several concurrency bugs in the kernel. There's also a lot of excess tcp debug spew (sorry).Source code is available (Apache) https://github.com/russor/crazierl/

HN · launched Mar 29, 2026 · 72 upvotes (top 12%) · 0 views

Niche: experimental and embedded operating systems · 142 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Building an operating system kernel based around the BEAM Erlang virtual machine and compiling it to boot on x86 hardware/emulators requires low-level kernel development and runtime porting expertise.

What it would actually take: Creating an Erlang OS entails writing bare-metal bootloaders and x86 hardware initialization (interrupt handling, paging, memory management) in C or Assembly, followed by porting the entire Erlang runtime system (ERTS) to run without a host POSIX OS (unikernel architecture). It requires deep knowledge of x86 architecture, the BEAM internal C runtime, and virtual networking via WebSocket proxies.

Discussion

14 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Hydros (Erlang OS with IO-APIC and NIF support), DragonFlyBSD (lightweight kernel threads with message passing), v86 (JavaScript/WebAssembly virtual PC)

Concerns raised: Memory management implementation quality not finalized, Hydros project website no longer available, Browser-based demo performance/feasibility questions

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 75 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #16 of 76 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 144 days after the earliest competitor.

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