PC running software without OS

[T3sl4co1l]

Early x86 were also tuned more for assembler than C, and C compilers sucked (and BASIC was a joke of myriad subroutines; but a scripting language, pasted into an EXE if you had the compiler).  Both are quite good together, and modern (post-386) optimization is all about managing caches.

OS overhead is quite small for the most part.  Heck, even if it were a mere 1%, that's still a huge amount of computation available.

Tim

[SirAlucard]

There is bare metal programming, however anything you'd want to do with it you'd have to program in your own drivers and what have you. It's by no means an easy way to get speed. I myself have tried looking into ways of speeding up boot times with a Raspberry pi, trying to look for the thinnest OS I can find. The problem with that, is it doesn't come with some of the bare essentials you need. So while you could do it without an OS, or at the very least a bare bones OS. Sometimes it's just better to work with what you have and try to trim the fat where you can.

[james_s]

I wouldn't say BASIC sucked. It was designed as a very easy to use beginners programming language that was also quite versatile. For what it was intended to do it did a good job, I suspect quite a large percentage of us got our first taste of programming by using BASIC.

[SirAlucard]

I wouldn't say BASIC sucked. It was designed as a very easy to use beginners programming language that was also quite versatile. For what it was intended to do it did a good job, I suspect quite a large percentage of us got our first taste of programming by using BASIC.

Does TI-Basic count? lol My very first jaunt in programming was doing basic on a TI-83 back in Jr.high. I programmed a couple of programs to have easier access to equations, as well as do a few calculations for me based on some RPGs I was playing at the time.