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I can only imagine what sort of chaos exists in Windows and OSX. Unfortunately I can only do that: imagine, because it is closed source. With Linux, I can at le

by jimmy1 9y ago

I can only imagine what sort of chaos exists in Windows and OSX. Unfortunately I can only do that: imagine, because it is closed source. With Linux, I can at least see the mess, and well, make a map out of it.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
I find it annoying that any time someone criticises Linux for something someone has to come and point out that Windows and OSX are also kinda crappy. It's true enough, it's also just useless defensiveness. Maybe the bar we set for ourselves should be a little higher than the stuff everyone complains about?
- jimmy1 9y ago
  I think you are reading into my stance as defending Linux -- I am not. I am just saying you have to take this criticism into perspective, and consider the alternatives. I find the clamours for the <insert "beautiful" other OS here> equally useless, as they haven't had the success linux has had in the server world, and because of that, I don't care how much more "elegant" another solution is -- it doesn't have the body of work to back it up. Linux is, for now, the best option. If it's a "tangled mess of code" let's figure out how to make it better. After all, it is open source.
- andrepd 9y ago
  Maybe it's just nigh impossible to build such a complex engineering project and keep it elegant through 25 years of development?
psyc 9y ago
I have looked upon code that struck me down with Lovecraftian dread. Here, let me paint you a picture of a ubiquitous Microsoft product, written in C++. Entry point calls Initialize. Initialize calls Initialize2, which calls Initialize_internal, which recurses to Initialize with a flag that makes it branch another way, which calls Initialize_subsystem, which calls Initialize_subsystem2, etc, which finally recurses again to Initialize_internal with another flag ... Honestly I never even made it out of the init code. I asked to be taken off the project immediately.
leeter 9y ago
IIRC the windows team has been in the process of cleaning up the NT Kernel for awhile (since vista at least) with the clear goal of getting NT back to "Dave Cutler's NT". The visible bits of this are the Server Micro project that's used for containers and Server core.
floren 9y ago
You can look at the OSX kernel code, just grab Apple's XNU repository. I've built bootable kernels from it. The code's not terrible, but the weirdest part to me is that there's the OSFMK microkernel portion, and then there's the BSD subsystem. They use different types, and they have their own syscall tables, and it was never clear to me where a particular bit of code would reside. I only dabbled in it, of course.

by jimmy1 9y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago

I find it annoying that any time someone criticises Linux for something someone has to come and point out that Windows and OSX are also kinda crappy. It's true enough, it's also just useless defensiveness. Maybe the bar we set for ourselves should be a little higher than the stuff everyone complains about?

jimmy1 9y ago
I think you are reading into my stance as defending Linux -- I am not. I am just saying you have to take this criticism into perspective, and consider the alternatives. I find the clamours for the <insert "beautiful" other OS here> equally useless, as they haven't had the success linux has had in the server world, and because of that, I don't care how much more "elegant" another solution is -- it doesn't have the body of work to back it up. Linux is, for now, the best option. If it's a "tangled mess of code" let's figure out how to make it better. After all, it is open source.
andrepd 9y ago
Maybe it's just nigh impossible to build such a complex engineering project and keep it elegant through 25 years of development?

psyc 9y ago

I have looked upon code that struck me down with Lovecraftian dread. Here, let me paint you a picture of a ubiquitous Microsoft product, written in C++. Entry point calls Initialize. Initialize calls Initialize2, which calls Initialize_internal, which recurses to Initialize with a flag that makes it branch another way, which calls Initialize_subsystem, which calls Initialize_subsystem2, etc, which finally recurses again to Initialize_internal with another flag ... Honestly I never even made it out of the init code. I asked to be taken off the project immediately.

leeter 9y ago

IIRC the windows team has been in the process of cleaning up the NT Kernel for awhile (since vista at least) with the clear goal of getting NT back to "Dave Cutler's NT". The visible bits of this are the Server Micro project that's used for containers and Server core.

floren 9y ago

You can look at the OSX kernel code, just grab Apple's XNU repository. I've built bootable kernels from it. The code's not terrible, but the weirdest part to me is that there's the OSFMK microkernel portion, and then there's the BSD subsystem. They use different types, and they have their own syscall tables, and it was never clear to me where a particular bit of code would reside. I only dabbled in it, of course.