[xobs]

> Rust? Only Rust?

Yes, this OS is written in Rust. However, since it has a well-defined ABI, and all services are defined to use `#[repr(C)]`, and the interface is simple primitive enums, it's designed with C-like language support in mind. The hardest part in C is getting an equivalent to `#[repr(C, align(4096))]` which, last time I checked, only let you do alignments up to 64 or so without resorting to linker tricks.

> This mechanism seems ripe for squatting attacks

There are only a few services with well-known names, and they start up before things like the scheduler are running. Most things go through the nameserver service which supports things like attestation, finite-client limits, and signature checking.

> Just use standard ELF.

Sure, there's a loader available that lets you run standard ELF files: https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core/tree/main/apps/app...

The bootloader uses the MiniELF format because we can make assertations about things like the order of sections and about merging multiple segments, while also stripping non-loadable sections. It would be possible to just bundle all the ELF images for all programs together, but if you're generating the loader image you might as well shrink the image a bit.

> What?? No! sbrk() is a terrible interface.

Then you can call `MapMemory(NULL, NULL, [size], RWX)`: https://docs.rs/xous/latest/xous/syscall/fn.map_memory.html