4 ms·
I’m all for thinking outside the box but many of the complaints described in that are blamed on UNIX when in fact they were also adopted by a multitude of other
by pushpop 7y ago
I’m all for thinking outside the box but many of the complaints described in that are blamed on UNIX when in fact they were also adopted by a multitude of other non-UNIX platforms and reason they became common was because it simply made more sense for general computing.
For example their “file system” (for want a better description) approach was tried on an IBM mainframe and it proved more cumbersome to maintain than the typical file system approach we have currently.
Also when talking about address spaces he acknowledges traditional memory management exists for security reasons then says that’s not needed in his OS without actually proving how his method either prevents the same attacks nor new ones that effectively result in the same kind of vulnerability (I could think of a few very easy attacks against his OS design).
Similarly the way he combines physical storage and system memory into one device completely overlooks technical limitations of the hardware, the risk of data loss if you don’t manage things correctly, the vastly different storage capacities between the two, nor the fact that basically every OS does this to some extent already via caching.
While it’s nice to go back to the drawing board and rethink certain idioms, this felt more like a half baked rant at UNIX than an objective look at the past and current OS designs.
- hnlmorg 7y agoThat was my take away as well. Some interesting ideas - most of which aren't new - but the ideology felt very biased. To a fault even. I would still love to see a working version of this. Or even just a more traditional general computing OS but one which used FP (not necessarily LISP) as its primitive.
- TuringTest 7y agoThis article I read yesterday has one interesting take on what an OS designed on modern programming principles could look like. It has a loose treatment of technical FP terms, but the insights behind it are at least thought-provoking. https://medium.com/@reinman/monoids-to-groupoids-492c35105113 https://medium.com/@reinman/monoids-to-groupoids-492c3510511... I believe we're in for a redesign of OS architectures, now that the 50's assumption of a single machine with a single OS kernel running all programs (or the 60's equivalent of several few mainframes communicating through a slow network) is no longer the main paradigm.
- all2 7y agoThe article reminds me of what Erlang is meant to do. With pure message passing wouldn't the need for some foo() calling some bar() be down to shooting off a message?
- 0x445442 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk&t=397s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk&t=397s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBfB2MJw3qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBfB2MJw3qg