3 ms·

We could ask a lot of questions, but at the end of the day system complexity will increase the likelyhood of so-called "system accidents" for any type of system

by blub 8y ago

We could ask a lot of questions, but at the end of the day system complexity will increase the likelyhood of so-called "system accidents" for any type of system, not just SW. One of the most effective measures to combat such issues is to... reduce the system's complexity. E.g. by not having another VM running on top of the OS just to read and write e-mail. Since this won't happen any time soon due to various reasons, the only reasonable thing left to do for most of us is to grab some popcorn and watch how the software development world struggles to contain the mess we made and fail at it.

phkahler 8y ago
It was eye opening to me when there was mention of a 2 TiB map being created and something about 128MiB chunks. I'd just like to smack the person that thought that was a good idea. I can understand thoughts like "but the blocks won't actually be allocated" or some such, but you have to step back and say "WTF are you even doing with anything that large?" Control freak. And yes, web browsers are becoming an OS on their own. I consider that a failure of the underlying OSes we have. Tabbed browsers are awesome, but they exist because OSes and standard desktops (GUI toolkits) didn't come up with decent ways to handle that. Browsers are also trying to implement fine grained access to resources - because our OSes haven't managed to do that for them yet. Memory management? I have no idea why you'd do that in ANY application software today. Actually there is a reason - people don't trust the OS or think they can do something better, but it ends up creating extra complexity. Complexity is categorically bad and should be avoided unless it's the only way to do something. Remember how X got its own memory and font management? Same thing.
- MBCook 8y ago
  It’s keeping track of 16k blocks of memory that way. If you changed it to 4MB you’d have to track and scan 512k. We have a GIANT address space to play with. Why not use it? They’re not actually using 128MB per function.

by blub 8y ago

phkahler 8y ago

It was eye opening to me when there was mention of a 2 TiB map being created and something about 128MiB chunks. I'd just like to smack the person that thought that was a good idea. I can understand thoughts like "but the blocks won't actually be allocated" or some such, but you have to step back and say "WTF are you even doing with anything that large?" Control freak. And yes, web browsers are becoming an OS on their own. I consider that a failure of the underlying OSes we have. Tabbed browsers are awesome, but they exist because OSes and standard desktops (GUI toolkits) didn't come up with decent ways to handle that. Browsers are also trying to implement fine grained access to resources - because our OSes haven't managed to do that for them yet. Memory management? I have no idea why you'd do that in ANY application software today. Actually there is a reason - people don't trust the OS or think they can do something better, but it ends up creating extra complexity. Complexity is categorically bad and should be avoided unless it's the only way to do something. Remember how X got its own memory and font management? Same thing.

MBCook 8y ago
It’s keeping track of 16k blocks of memory that way. If you changed it to 4MB you’d have to track and scan 512k. We have a GIANT address space to play with. Why not use it? They’re not actually using 128MB per function.