Cosmos is expanding

I've been putting down a lot of time working on the Cosmos project over the last few months, and it's fun to see all the progress we've been making.

The network driver for the RTL is complete enough to send and receive the data we want, and currently further development for RTL and UDP is continued by Chad Hower (here and here).

I've moved over to filesystem, and am working with the Virtual Filesystem layer. Currently it's working on top of the Ext2 filesystem, but the purpose of this layer is to be filesystem independent. We can enumerate directories and files using classes in the System.IO namespace, but I haven't begun to read inside files yet. For that we are going to need support for Streams.

Often during the development I come across certain basic parts of the .NET framework which break our build, so I keep going back to the absolute basics to fix those as well. As an example I added lots of Console.Write and Console.WriteLine overloads, since we were unable to print lots of basic types. Today I fixed Boolean.Parse(string) and Boolean.TryParse(string, out bool).

I believe it's important to get all this basic functionality in place as well, not just features like network, filesystem and compilation speed. It'll be a lot easier for newcomers to get started if we have all the basics in place.