8 ms·

Back in the day, BeOS used to be quite more capable with regards to multi-threading. The used to demo this with multiple videos playing. Does BeOS/Haiku still

• kitsunesoba 8y ago
  Haiku doesn’t have much of a technological edge at the moment, given that the current goal is to reproduce BeOS 5 PE to its fullest extent before modernizing. Where it does have an edge, though, is how’s its being designed first and foremost as a desktop OS with responsiveness as the top priority above all else. The latter especially is depressingly uncommon in modern operating systems.
  • snazz 8y ago
    I agree on the responsiveness part and would like to add that the fact that BeOS dropped you to a debugger shell when it crashed is something missing from modern desktop OSs. Just like the Lisp Machine (Genera, at least), introspection is something that’s present in Haiku and BeOS that was cut out of many modern desktop operating systems for “security” and “ease of use”.
    • erikpukinskis 8y ago
      In the JavaScript world, debugging is almost a bad word. It’s almost impossible to maintain a sane debuggable trace though a “modern” JavaScript application. I find I have to ignore basically all of the standard frameworks and transpiration pipelines and just write old school PHP-like code in Node. I say all of this because I feel that my community has lost control of the debugging pipeline and I applaud Be and Haiku for making that a priority. I find the benefits of committing to an always-running, always-traceable-in-production execution thread is an EXTRAORDINARY productivity gain (vs console.logs and connecting to IDEs manually via various witchcraft)
      • porker 8y ago
        > In the JavaScript world, debugging is almost a bad word. It’s almost impossible to maintain a sane debuggable trace though a “modern” JavaScript application. I felt this last week as I tried Webpack 4 on a new project. The source maps weren't correct, and instead of debugging my app I had to debug multiple Webpack plugins and work out which one was breaking the source maps. Never did find out, but I fixed my app by debugging it mentally. It sure made me wish for a developer-first language.
    • int_19h 8y ago
      > The fact that BeOS dropped you to a debugger shell when it crashed is something missing from modern desktop OSs. Windows has that - if you have e.g. Visual Studio installed (or any other app that registers itself as a system-wide debugger), then application crash dialog will immediately offer to attach the debugger at the point of the crash.
      • pjmlp 8y ago
        Since Windows 3.1 actually, famous Dr. Watson.
    • dpg23 8y ago
      Check out GuixSD if you like Guile Scheme REPLs when something breaks! I also recall OpenBSD and FreeBSD dropping to debuggers on kernel panics.
  • mdasen 8y ago
    As someone who likes responsiveness, I've always wanted BeOS to take off. However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter? I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser? How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? When I evaluate an OS today, I'm going to care about how good its trackpad drivers are, whether I'm likely to have wifi issues, whether it can run the *nix tools I need to do my work, maybe whether I like the way it switches between windows/apps, and whether there are modern browsers to run on it. Responsiveness was a big deal back when I was running a Pentium II and BeOS had amazing demos (and I presume real-world usage) with uninterrupted video while multi-tasking and just buttery-smooth context switching in an era where you'd have your system lock-up. Heck, it was many years before OS X got past the beach ball of death happening constantly. However, today, it's my browser that locks up; it's my browser that I want to be able to smoothly scroll through a web page. I really want Haiku to succeed, but it feels like we might have moved beyond the OS for so much that the OS can't have the same impact it once had. On the one hand, the web has made it so that alternative OSs don't need a boat load of software to be usable. On the other hand, because the browser is now the OS, the usefulness of an alternative OS is lower.
    • Annatar 8y ago
      "However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter?" It always matters; I don't want to waste my life away in front of someone's irresponsive, laggy, slow software.
      • garmaine 8y ago
        You’re missing the point. With concurrency handled in user code and (I’d add) reduced latency from SSD storage, do you even want the OS to be excessively preemptive? Doing so has large drawbacks in terms of cache performance, and the difference is no longer noticeable.
        • Annatar 8y ago
  • mverwijs 8y ago
    The thing that always blew me away with BeOS was the time it took to cold boot. From powering on a machine to being ready to work. It was seconds. Still faster than a chromebook. That sure is something that most OS'es today can't do.
    • Annatar 8y ago
      AmigaOS can, and yes it's still being developed.
    • swiftcoder 8y ago
      You can configure most Debian variants to boot in seconds from a decent SSD. Ubuntu Server edition was really pushing this for a while, the desktop editions don't seem to prioritise boot times quite so highly. Hell, even Windows 10 boots from an SSD these days in less time than my BIOS takes to start the Windows boot process...
      • reaperducer 8y ago
        By introducing SSD into the equation, you're creating a false equivalency.
        • swiftcoder 8y ago
          Sure, but it's a lot less disruptive solution to boot times than switching OS.
      • chungy 8y ago
        Desktop boot time mostly doesn't matter, it is an infrequent event -- once a day at most, if the system is shut down at night. Server boot time, on the other hand, does matter. You really don't want a server to be down for longer than it has to. Being able to reboot in 10 seconds is huge compared to rebooting in a couple minutes. Now, given that servers are fundamentally running the same OS, improvements geared towards that market tend to bleed over to desktop as well. Desktop just has a bit more to bring up, with a graphical environment and everything.
• monocasa 8y ago
  AFAIK, the kernel is actually real time in a way that Linux and NT aren't. Even RT-Linux is very soft real time.
  • garmaine 8y ago
    BeOS wasn’t hard real time afaik.
    • monocasa 8y ago
      The NewOS kernel is from what I can tell.
  • tialaramex 8y ago
    "in a way that Linux and NT aren't" BeOS offered the same FIFO scheduling mechanic that allows Linux to support soft real-time. RTLinux was a hard real-time OS which runs Linux as a lower priority service you can pre-empt with your actual hard real-time stuff. Similar systems still exist today. They work fine, if, in fact, what you needed actually was "hard real-time". If your idea of the potential consequences when your system misses a deadline is more like "Some users are annoyed and demand refunds" rather than "I might go to jail for manslaughter" or "The $40M space probe turns into space garbage" then "hard real-time" probably wasn't what you needed after all.
    • monocasa 8y ago
      My point was that (in my experience as a embedded engineer for high availability systems) NewOS has much smaller windows between kernel preemption points, particularly in comparison to Linux (even RT) and NT. Is Haiku only soft real time? Yes, and I never said anything different. Does it do a markedly better job at making real time commitments than NT or even RT-Linux? Absolutely mainly due to how much simpler of a kernel it is. Also, I'm going to throw out there that if you're going to get uppity about hard real time guarantees out of nowhere and throwing out concepts lime manslaughtee charges out of nowhere, I hope that you're only choosing sel4 as last time I checked it was the only kernel that backed up it's guarantees in a way that it can be checked.
• tialaramex 8y ago
  Other contemporary multi-processor operating systems were also easily capable of displaying a handful of postage stamp (QVGA or smaller IIRC) videos. This was a demo other people weren't doing mostly not because it was hard to achieve but because it was pointless, what use did you have for showing several videos simultaneously? They chose to show several postage stamp videos because they only had software decoding. At the time the way most competitors handled video on consumer hardware was to decode to YUV and then overlay and scale that with dedicated hardware, and on most systems you could only play one video this way. BeOS would be much worse at that with a software decoder, by showing many videos they could "make a virtue of a necessity" as they say. The best thing in Haiku is probably their vector icon format, which offers a good mix of basic vector features for small pictures in a compact binary format. It's mentioned briefly in that article.
  • acdha 8y ago
    In my experience BeOS had much better single, full-resolution video playback or editing experience as well. Editing DV footage on BeOS had a no-stutter experience which took MacOS and Windows another decade to deliver, especially since it was rock-solid under multitasking – not just not needing to close your email client or browser but even things like compiling Mozilla from source didn’t cause a dropped frame.
  • laumars 8y ago
    I don't think that's entirely fair. Back then I used to be quite an whore when it came to operating systems. I had Windows 2000, Windows 95 (for the rare game that wouldn't run on 2k), BeOS, Linux and Mac OS 9. BeOS was by far the snappiest (actually it was 95, but that was 5 years old by that point, only running DOS games and didn't take advantage of the SMP I was running). BeOS ran circles around everything else - particularly when multitasking - and I was did use each platform heavily.
    • keithnoizu 8y ago
      I had a similar experience. Windows 2000, ME, 98 and 95, Suse Linux, BeOS. BeOS was way better at multitasking, video playback, etc. I really lamented it's fall.
• ianai 8y ago
  A GUI feature I read about in 5: menus were going to have a colorized band that followed through all the menus and submenus. It seemed like a feature that would really help with complex software, but of course never saw the light of day. To this day, drilling down to deep submenus quickly becomes user abuse. It wastes a lot of time to have to drill down to something only to have all the menus disappear because the mouse tracked off the submenu accidentally. It was also just cool to have a GUI mounted on a Unix like os - which wasn’t Linux. Nowadays though I’d like to see some Plan9-isms adopted instead of cloud stuff. I think people would benefit from being able to make their own user experience that was kept more or less unchanged and the same files and preferences available on all of their devices. I’d also like to be able to “mount” processor/memory hardware from networked machines and delegate processing to them and output results to the local GUI. Like tunneling X but without actually needing to pipe the whole user stack - just the compute input/output.
• gsich 8y ago
  Pretty sure that other OSes could do that too. But most people can't watch 5 videos simultaneously so why try?
  • eitland 8y ago
    > But most people can't watch 5 videos simultaneously so why try? Off the top of my head: security guards do. And if you limit a general purpose (operating) system by what most users need you'll soon end up with a system where most users miss something.
    • gsich 8y ago
      The "why try" was not meant that other OS can't do it. Just that users don't have the need for that. Showing that BeOS can do it, does not mean other OS can't do it too.