Nitrocid KS 0.1.0 is an upcoming release of the Nitrocid application, a PC terminal app that would simulate how would our future-planned kernel, Nitrocid, be integrated with our operating system.
As of the writing, we’ve already released Nitrocid KS 0.1.0 Beta 2 on August 10th. Since then, it witnessed many core changes to the kernel, and such changes were made with thought in order to try to fix lingering kernel bugs that were affecting many versions for a long time, including, most notably, the command cancellation bug that is plaguing us since our support of .NET 6.0 was added back on 0.0.22.0.
We’re presenting you with another update of this upcoming version of the kernel, and here are some of our expectations, as the release is getting closer.
Starting next week, the development will be slightly slower than usual, as we didn’t expect that the 0.1.0 version of the simulated kernel would get stable faster than planned.
.NET 8.0
.NET 8.0 will be integrated with the final version of Nitrocid KS 0.1.0 to earn new features and improvements shipped with the framework itself. We also expect a migration to the improved version of the built-in JSON library (not Newtonsoft.JSON, but System.Text.Json) to take advantage of the non-reflection-based serialization and deserialization.
The announcement is going to be made with the release of .NET 8.0 to clarify what areas of the framework are improved.
What about .NET Framework?
Support for .NET Framework 4.8, even if Microsoft intends to support it within the lifetime of the OS, will not be brought back as we use features that are tied to the modern .NET framework and for performance reasons.
Faster startup times
Recent changes to the hardware parsing code were met with disappointment for Linux users because it got slower than usual. This was because of the usage of Inxi.NET, which was made initially as a front-end for Inxi.
A new library, SpecProbe, is going to be made to fully replace Inxi.NET’s overreliance on the external processes with the new library’s performance when it comes to hardware parsing, because we’re trying so hard to be a wrapper for both the Win32 API for hardware information and the Linux’s proc and sys interfaces, as well as its native code, for performance reasons.
A new benchmark results will be released alongside the library release itself.
Faster terminal rendering
Since Beta 2’s release, we’re always trying to increase the speed of the terminal rendering to make the experience smoother than before. Expect your screensavers to be blazing fast after Beta 3 gets released to the public!
Thanks to improvements made to the terminal rendering tools, especially the changes made to the VT sequence filtering logic and the buffer-based positional writing, rendering to the terminal is now faster than Beta 2. The benchmark results (inside Nitrocid) will be done to prove our point once Beta 3 releases.
However, you can enjoy these improvements in your terminal apps starting from Terminaux 1.7.0 or higher.
Expected release date
We expect the third and the final beta to be released on January 1st, 2024, as the kernel is now mostly stable, except that it can still be buggy than the final version, and that it can still be missing its last pack of the most exciting features, which should be done by the release candidate.
The final version of the simulator still has no actual release date, but we expect it to be released in the first quarter of the next year as an estimation. The date will be revealed in the third beta announcement.
Enjoy!
Aptivi 
Thoughts?