15 ms·

Don't worry, by the time it is complete and mature, it will be complex and full of quirks too. I'm not convinced that even Google has the resources to build so

Don't worry, by the time it is complete and mature, it will be complex and full of quirks too. I'm not convinced that even Google has the resources to build something like that successfully. Except perhaps if they target a very specific use case.

kev009 9y ago
What do you make of, for instance, OS X or VxWorks?
- Alupis 9y ago
  OSX is based on Darwin, which is a Unix (BSD-like) operating system. I'm certain you can find complexities and bloat in there too, if you look.
  - Waterluvian 9y ago
    Of course. And they don't even pretend that's untrue. Every few releases they focus on lowering bloat.
  - kev009 9y ago
    I'm referencing the abilities of F500 companies to sustain OS development. OS X has roots in mach, and some BSD, but to call it either one is trivializing the amount of work that has gone on.
  - shp0ngle 9y ago
    Oh hell yeah OS X has tons of weird quirks and compatibility mindfucks going back to their transition from OS 9 (all those .DS_Store and _filename files for "resource forks") Backwards compatibility is #1 reason for increasing complexity. Apple is sometimes good in cutting away compatibility for the sake of cleaning up, but there are still weird issues poking now and then hell the whole NSEverything is a compatibility thing with NextStep, which is long dead.
    - catwell 9y ago
      Apple doesn't really appeat to care about backward compatibility though. They break lots of things with every release of the OS. I would give that excuse to Microsoft, but not Apple.
      - Shorel 9y ago
        True. But the legacy code is still there. Which is the worst of both worlds.
        blattimwind 9y ago
        Doesn't work, isn't maintained, but remains as an attack vector and failure mode.
        jernfrost 9y ago
        Disagree. Microsoft keep making new APIs and depricating old ones. With Mac you got cocoa which goes back to 1989 and you can still use. It might not be backwards compatible but from a developers perspective it is nice to be able to reuse old knowledge. I think Apple has been much better than MS or Linux in continously modernizing and upgrading what they have. On windows and linux things tend to become dead ends as new flashy APIs appear. Sure old win32 and motif apps might still run but nobody really develops using these APIs anymore. On windows I first use win32, then MFC, then it was WinForms. Then all of that got depricated and we got WPF, silverlight and then I sort of lost track of what was going on. Meanwhile on Linux people used tcl/tk for GUIs early on. And there was motif, wxeindows. KDE and Gnome went through several full rewrites. If we look at MacOS X as the modern version of NeXTSTEP the core technology has been remarkable stable. Sure they have broken compatibility plenty of times but the principles and API are at their core the same.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        Quickdraw VR, Quickdraw 3D, NetTalk, JavaBridge, Carbon, Objective-C GC, RubyCocoa, WebObjects, .... One just needs to look into the right spot.
  - catwell 9y ago
    I concur, macOS is a nightmare. I didn't think so before I had to write code for it, but I am currently writing code that runs on 5 OSs (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS) and macOS is by far the worst of all. In particular, everything related to filesystems was a nightmare, especially HFS+. Thankfully Apple is replacing it with the much more sane APFS. I don't have much experience with them but I think VxWorks and QNX are good examples of simpler OSs. I do have some experience with Minix3 and it is certainly one. I guess the BSDs stand somewhere in the middle.
    - dfox 9y ago
      QNX always had practically oriented limitations of the general microkernel idea (eg. QNX native IPC/RPC is always synchronous) which allowed it to be essentially the only reasonably performant true micro kernel OS in the 90's. Unfortunately it seems that after QNX got repeatably bought by various entities the OS got various weird compatibility-with-who-knows-what hacks.
- BurningCycles 9y ago
  AFAIK OSX is built on mostly pre-existing components like Mach and FreeBSD. I know nothing about VxWorks.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  I don't quite see where you're trying to go with these. Are they supposed to be examples of POSIX systems or something else?
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Google already has a track record of building half an OS in android and its a pretty mediocre one with some redeeming qualities.
  - discreteevent 9y ago
    The fuchsia part of android is linux? Anyway Google has a lot of people working for it. I don't think anyone would have expected NT to come from Microsoft at the time that it did.
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    Is this the same OS that smokes an iPhone X with an A11? Not bad for "half an OS". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B65ND8vUaKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B65ND8vUaKc
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      You posted a video wherein the tester simply sequentially opens and closes a series of apps on a Samsung and Apple device seeing which will run through the sequence faster...and the Samsung was a bit slower. In theory it makes me wonder if iphone's storage is slightly faster than the latest galaxy or if the process by which one loads an iphone app is slightly faster/more efficient than the one by which an android app is loaded or if the tiny selection of apps the reviewer picked are just better optimized for iphone. Nobody smoked anyone and nothing of note was learned by anyone. So much so that I wonder why you bothered to watch said link or paste it here. I said half an OS because its built on technologies like linux and java not because its half assed even though it is.
      - bitmapbrother 9y ago
        >You posted a video wherein the tester simply sequentially opens and closes a series of apps on a Samsung and Apple device seeing which will run through the sequence faster...and the Samsung was a bit slower. Certain apps were slower to load on the Samsung device. Additionally, the Samsung device encoded the 4K siginificantly video faster and took round 1 by 14 seconds and round 2 by 16 seconds. >In theory it makes me wonder if iphone's storage is slightly faster than the latest galaxy or if the process by which one loads an iphone app is slightly faster/more efficient than the one by which an android app is loaded or if the tiny selection of apps the reviewer picked are just better optimized for iphone. Nobody smoked anyone and nothing of note was learned by anyone. So much so that I wonder why you bothered to watch said link or paste it here. The iPhone X has faster storage and a significantly faster SoC. A 30 second win by the Samsung phone is what I could call getting smoked. >I said half an OS because its built on technologies like linux and java not because its half assed even though it is. And iOS is was a decedent of MacOS which itself is a decedent of NeXTSTEP. It also uses a language 11 years older than Java. So it sounds like iOS also meets your criteria of being "half assed".
- wvenable 9y ago
  OS X is literally the next version of NeXTStep and, as others have pointed out, was built on other OS technologies.
  - dfox 9y ago
    And NeXTStep itself is to large extent one big ugly hack that stems from experience of trying to build Unix on top of Mach. In fact it is not microkernel, but monolithic kernel running as one big Mach task, thus simply replacing user/kernel split with task/priviledged-task split (which to large extent is also true for OS X).
    - bitofhope 9y ago
      >Unix on top of Mach Didn't Mach start out as a replacement kernel for BSD? Building a Unix on top of Mach is like building a truck over truck chassis.
      - dfox 9y ago
        It did not. Mach is traditional microkernel which provides IPC mechanism, process isolation and (somewhat controversially) memory mapping primitives and not much else. In late 80's/early 90's there were various projects that attemted to build unix on top of that as true micro kernel architecture with separate servers for each system service. Performance of such design was horrible and there are two things that resulted from that that are still somewhat relevant: running whole BSD/SysV kernel as Mach task, which today means OS X and Tru64 (at the time both systems had same origin as both are implementations of OSF Unix) and just ignoring the problem which is approach taken by GNU/Hurd.
        snvzz 9y ago
        >slowness Worth noting that's because Mach IPC is extremely slow, an order of magnitude slower than L4 family.
      - GeekyBear 9y ago
johnklos 9y ago
"not convinced that even Google" Google CAN'T do something small, simple and elegant, partly for the very reason that they're too big.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Google also can't be convinced to carry a project through to completion and release /salty.
  - qarioz 9y ago
    Google is very good in marketing. For example go.
    - meddlepal 9y ago
      Go has been a success as well because of that marketing machine.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      Why do people say this? What marketing has Google ever done for Go?
      - skykooler 9y ago
        Making it the first Google result for "go"? (Instead of the verb, or the game)
        zaarn 9y ago
        When I search "go" on google the first result I get is a package courier, then the game, then the verb... then comes Golang though.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        Its branding and companies using the language with hopes of being acquired by them is already good enough. Had Go been released at AT&T and it would have shared the same fate as Limbo.

kev009 9y ago

What do you make of, for instance, OS X or VxWorks?

Alupis 9y ago
OSX is based on Darwin, which is a Unix (BSD-like) operating system. I'm certain you can find complexities and bloat in there too, if you look.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  Of course. And they don't even pretend that's untrue. Every few releases they focus on lowering bloat.
- kev009 9y ago
  I'm referencing the abilities of F500 companies to sustain OS development. OS X has roots in mach, and some BSD, but to call it either one is trivializing the amount of work that has gone on.
- shp0ngle 9y ago
  Oh hell yeah OS X has tons of weird quirks and compatibility mindfucks going back to their transition from OS 9 (all those .DS_Store and _filename files for "resource forks") Backwards compatibility is #1 reason for increasing complexity. Apple is sometimes good in cutting away compatibility for the sake of cleaning up, but there are still weird issues poking now and then hell the whole NSEverything is a compatibility thing with NextStep, which is long dead.
  - catwell 9y ago
    Apple doesn't really appeat to care about backward compatibility though. They break lots of things with every release of the OS. I would give that excuse to Microsoft, but not Apple.
    - Shorel 9y ago
      True. But the legacy code is still there. Which is the worst of both worlds.
      - blattimwind 9y ago
        Doesn't work, isn't maintained, but remains as an attack vector and failure mode.
      - jernfrost 9y ago
        Disagree. Microsoft keep making new APIs and depricating old ones. With Mac you got cocoa which goes back to 1989 and you can still use. It might not be backwards compatible but from a developers perspective it is nice to be able to reuse old knowledge. I think Apple has been much better than MS or Linux in continously modernizing and upgrading what they have. On windows and linux things tend to become dead ends as new flashy APIs appear. Sure old win32 and motif apps might still run but nobody really develops using these APIs anymore. On windows I first use win32, then MFC, then it was WinForms. Then all of that got depricated and we got WPF, silverlight and then I sort of lost track of what was going on. Meanwhile on Linux people used tcl/tk for GUIs early on. And there was motif, wxeindows. KDE and Gnome went through several full rewrites. If we look at MacOS X as the modern version of NeXTSTEP the core technology has been remarkable stable. Sure they have broken compatibility plenty of times but the principles and API are at their core the same.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        Quickdraw VR, Quickdraw 3D, NetTalk, JavaBridge, Carbon, Objective-C GC, RubyCocoa, WebObjects, .... One just needs to look into the right spot.
- catwell 9y ago
  I concur, macOS is a nightmare. I didn't think so before I had to write code for it, but I am currently writing code that runs on 5 OSs (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS) and macOS is by far the worst of all. In particular, everything related to filesystems was a nightmare, especially HFS+. Thankfully Apple is replacing it with the much more sane APFS. I don't have much experience with them but I think VxWorks and QNX are good examples of simpler OSs. I do have some experience with Minix3 and it is certainly one. I guess the BSDs stand somewhere in the middle.
  - dfox 9y ago
    QNX always had practically oriented limitations of the general microkernel idea (eg. QNX native IPC/RPC is always synchronous) which allowed it to be essentially the only reasonably performant true micro kernel OS in the 90's. Unfortunately it seems that after QNX got repeatably bought by various entities the OS got various weird compatibility-with-who-knows-what hacks.
BurningCycles 9y ago
AFAIK OSX is built on mostly pre-existing components like Mach and FreeBSD. I know nothing about VxWorks.
saagarjha 9y ago
I don't quite see where you're trying to go with these. Are they supposed to be examples of POSIX systems or something else?
michaelmrose 9y ago
Google already has a track record of building half an OS in android and its a pretty mediocre one with some redeeming qualities.
- discreteevent 9y ago
  The fuchsia part of android is linux? Anyway Google has a lot of people working for it. I don't think anyone would have expected NT to come from Microsoft at the time that it did.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  Is this the same OS that smokes an iPhone X with an A11? Not bad for "half an OS". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B65ND8vUaKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B65ND8vUaKc
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    You posted a video wherein the tester simply sequentially opens and closes a series of apps on a Samsung and Apple device seeing which will run through the sequence faster...and the Samsung was a bit slower. In theory it makes me wonder if iphone's storage is slightly faster than the latest galaxy or if the process by which one loads an iphone app is slightly faster/more efficient than the one by which an android app is loaded or if the tiny selection of apps the reviewer picked are just better optimized for iphone. Nobody smoked anyone and nothing of note was learned by anyone. So much so that I wonder why you bothered to watch said link or paste it here. I said half an OS because its built on technologies like linux and java not because its half assed even though it is.
    - bitmapbrother 9y ago
      >You posted a video wherein the tester simply sequentially opens and closes a series of apps on a Samsung and Apple device seeing which will run through the sequence faster...and the Samsung was a bit slower. Certain apps were slower to load on the Samsung device. Additionally, the Samsung device encoded the 4K siginificantly video faster and took round 1 by 14 seconds and round 2 by 16 seconds. >In theory it makes me wonder if iphone's storage is slightly faster than the latest galaxy or if the process by which one loads an iphone app is slightly faster/more efficient than the one by which an android app is loaded or if the tiny selection of apps the reviewer picked are just better optimized for iphone. Nobody smoked anyone and nothing of note was learned by anyone. So much so that I wonder why you bothered to watch said link or paste it here. The iPhone X has faster storage and a significantly faster SoC. A 30 second win by the Samsung phone is what I could call getting smoked. >I said half an OS because its built on technologies like linux and java not because its half assed even though it is. And iOS is was a decedent of MacOS which itself is a decedent of NeXTSTEP. It also uses a language 11 years older than Java. So it sounds like iOS also meets your criteria of being "half assed".
wvenable 9y ago
OS X is literally the next version of NeXTStep and, as others have pointed out, was built on other OS technologies.
- dfox 9y ago
  And NeXTStep itself is to large extent one big ugly hack that stems from experience of trying to build Unix on top of Mach. In fact it is not microkernel, but monolithic kernel running as one big Mach task, thus simply replacing user/kernel split with task/priviledged-task split (which to large extent is also true for OS X).
  - bitofhope 9y ago
    >Unix on top of Mach Didn't Mach start out as a replacement kernel for BSD? Building a Unix on top of Mach is like building a truck over truck chassis.
    - dfox 9y ago
      It did not. Mach is traditional microkernel which provides IPC mechanism, process isolation and (somewhat controversially) memory mapping primitives and not much else. In late 80's/early 90's there were various projects that attemted to build unix on top of that as true micro kernel architecture with separate servers for each system service. Performance of such design was horrible and there are two things that resulted from that that are still somewhat relevant: running whole BSD/SysV kernel as Mach task, which today means OS X and Tru64 (at the time both systems had same origin as both are implementations of OSF Unix) and just ignoring the problem which is approach taken by GNU/Hurd.
      - snvzz 9y ago
        >slowness Worth noting that's because Mach IPC is extremely slow, an order of magnitude slower than L4 family.
    - GeekyBear 9y ago

johnklos 9y ago

"not convinced that even Google" Google CAN'T do something small, simple and elegant, partly for the very reason that they're too big.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Google also can't be convinced to carry a project through to completion and release /salty.
- qarioz 9y ago
  Google is very good in marketing. For example go.
  - meddlepal 9y ago
    Go has been a success as well because of that marketing machine.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Why do people say this? What marketing has Google ever done for Go?
    - skykooler 9y ago
      Making it the first Google result for "go"? (Instead of the verb, or the game)
      - zaarn 9y ago
        When I search "go" on google the first result I get is a package courier, then the game, then the verb... then comes Golang though.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Its branding and companies using the language with hopes of being acquired by them is already good enough. Had Go been released at AT&T and it would have shared the same fate as Limbo.