4 ms·

Dave Cutler is a better OS engineer than Linus Torvalds. Fact.

nindalf 8y ago
Is it necessary to compare them? I'm puzzled why we seem to do this everywhere. When some people see Messi score a goal, the immediate reaction isn't "what a great goal", it's "he's better than Ronaldo". Why can't we just appreciate greatness without comparing?
- criddell 8y ago
  I hate it too. The tribalism around tech things and politics and nutrition and cars and just about anything feels so damned toxic.
adrian_b 8y ago
While I agree that Dave Cutler was a very good OS engineer, it absolutely ridiculous to compare the work of an experienced OS engineer who already learned a lot by designing other operating systems and who also was free to design a new incompatible OS, with the work of an inexperienced senior student, whose purpose was just to reimplement the UNIX API's. Even if the Linux kernel has evolved internally a lot since then, it has remained constrained by the userland POSIX interfaces, some of which are obsolete. You cannot predict whether Linus, at his current age and experience (which only now are similar with those of Dave Cutler when designing Windows NT), would do a better or a worse OS than Dave Cutler, if he would be free to abandon everything else and to design a new incompatible OS, without legacy baggage. Even if it had a nice clean design, I do not remember anything really revolutionary in the initial Windows NT, at least in the features exposed to the users. Almost everything had a correspondence either in UNIX or in OS/2, but because NT could afford to be incompatible, most NT interfaces had various nice improvements, especially in asynchronous IO, event handling and security. Also because they were designed together instead of being accreted over a long time, the NT interfaces and types were much more consistent in the beginning, compared to UNIX. After other 25 years, Windows has accumulated again countless API additions and replacements, so the initial consistency is long gone.
- loeg 8y ago
  I don't think it's true anymore than Linux is constrained by POSIX. POSIX is dead; Linux has been adding new non-POSIX APIs for probably decades.
sctb 8y ago
Could you please try to increase the quality of your comments? We're here to learn something substantive, and one-liners don't deliver. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nbevans 8y ago
  Eh? It was a worthwhile comment written in a tongue in cheek style. Just look at the conversations it spawned.
gaius 8y ago
Apples to oranges. Cutler designs new OSs from first principles, Torvalds implemented a version of an existing OS. You might compare Cutler to Tanenbaum if you wish.

Is it necessary to compare them? I'm puzzled why we seem to do this everywhere. When some people see Messi score a goal, the immediate reaction isn't "what a great goal", it's "he's better than Ronaldo". Why can't we just appreciate greatness without comparing?

criddell 8y ago
I hate it too. The tribalism around tech things and politics and nutrition and cars and just about anything feels so damned toxic.

adrian_b 8y ago

While I agree that Dave Cutler was a very good OS engineer, it absolutely ridiculous to compare the work of an experienced OS engineer who already learned a lot by designing other operating systems and who also was free to design a new incompatible OS, with the work of an inexperienced senior student, whose purpose was just to reimplement the UNIX API's. Even if the Linux kernel has evolved internally a lot since then, it has remained constrained by the userland POSIX interfaces, some of which are obsolete. You cannot predict whether Linus, at his current age and experience (which only now are similar with those of Dave Cutler when designing Windows NT), would do a better or a worse OS than Dave Cutler, if he would be free to abandon everything else and to design a new incompatible OS, without legacy baggage. Even if it had a nice clean design, I do not remember anything really revolutionary in the initial Windows NT, at least in the features exposed to the users. Almost everything had a correspondence either in UNIX or in OS/2, but because NT could afford to be incompatible, most NT interfaces had various nice improvements, especially in asynchronous IO, event handling and security. Also because they were designed together instead of being accreted over a long time, the NT interfaces and types were much more consistent in the beginning, compared to UNIX. After other 25 years, Windows has accumulated again countless API additions and replacements, so the initial consistency is long gone.

loeg 8y ago
I don't think it's true anymore than Linux is constrained by POSIX. POSIX is dead; Linux has been adding new non-POSIX APIs for probably decades.

sctb 8y ago

Could you please try to increase the quality of your comments? We're here to learn something substantive, and one-liners don't deliver. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nbevans 8y ago
Eh? It was a worthwhile comment written in a tongue in cheek style. Just look at the conversations it spawned.

gaius 8y ago

Apples to oranges. Cutler designs new OSs from first principles, Torvalds implemented a version of an existing OS. You might compare Cutler to Tanenbaum if you wish.