6 ms·

I thought this talk was an interesting overview of some of the limitations of Unix (particularly Linux) and C, although I wish the speaker had discussed more de

I thought this talk was an interesting overview of some of the limitations of Unix (particularly Linux) and C, although I wish the speaker had discussed more details as to why C is not a match for modern processor architectures and how modern languages such as Rust address these issues. Another thing that I'm curious about is how much familiarity the speaker has with Plan 9? Plan 9 from Bell Labs is the spiritual successor to Unix, created by many of the Bell Labs researchers who originally worked on Unix. The creators of Plan 9 pushed "everything is a file" to its limits. Sadly, although I have read some Plan 9 papers, I haven't actually used the operating system. I'm really curious about what the USB example in this talk would look like in Plan 9? I do wish there was more development in alternative operating systems. I like Unix, but there were many ideas from VMS, Smalltalk, the Genera operating system for Symbolics LISP machines, the classic Mac OS, BeOS, Plan 9, and other operating systems that we can learn from and that would be very useful to have today. Also, today's hardware is quite different from the hardware of 50 years ago. We have multi-core CPUs, GPUs with hundreds of cores, very fast NVMe storage devices, and other amazing technologies. There has also been much advancements in programming languages, with more people willing to explore alternatives to C and C++ such as Python, Rust, Go, Clojure, Haskell, Swift, and many more, each providing different abstractions for dealing with diverse programming tasks. I wonder what an operating system for the 2020s would look like given the advances in technology and the lessons learned in the past decade.

jammygit 7y ago
He gave a good talk about SystemD once too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo edit: found a version with better camera angles
- sprash 7y ago
  I didn't like that talk at all. I disagree with almost everything he says[1]. This talk is much better but some of his criticism are rather pointless because what he wants is a complete new OS design vastly different from UNIX. If he likes Windows/MacOS so much he should just use that. 1.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966321
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    I agree that criticizing UNIX for being UNIX is pointless.
pjmlp 7y ago
> I wonder what an operating system for the 2020s would look like given the advances in technology and the lessons learned in the past decade. While not perfect, with their own set of issues, macOS/iOS, Windows (with .NET/UWP) and Android are a couple of steps into that direction. Interesting that you refer Plan 9, but fail to mention Inferno, which was the final vision from the same researchers. Regarding UNIX, one thing that keeps being missed regarding NeXTSTEP and its derived OSes, and to go along your remark, it that for NeXT and Apple, UNIX wasn't never relevant. The UNIX compatibility was just a means to bootstrap the OS and attack the UNIX workstation market, the Objective-C technology stack (now Swift as well) was/is where the real value of the OS was. Anyone using macOS or nowadays WSL as UNIX replacement, is replicating the farmer's story from the talk.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > Interesting that you refer Plan 9, but fail to mention Inferno, which was the final vision from the same researchers. For the lazy like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
- cpach 7y ago
  I quite frequently see people mention Plan 9, but seldom Inferno. Does anyone know why Plan 9 became more popular?
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Lack of teaching would be one. I bet not many professors bother to dive into it. The documentation is still available, http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/, and you can get it as open source and commercial variants, http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ So it is mostly a matter of actually caring to dive into it. Not only one will discover how many of the Plan 9 design issues got worked on, some of the design ideas that went into Go will be more clear. It is also revealing to dive into Oberon OS linage and then see how some of its design went into ACME on Plan 9, dynamic loading on Inferno or eventually Go's method call and unsafe package design. Instead most get off at the Plan 9 train station.
aruggirello 7y ago
> there were many ideas from VMS, Smalltalk, the Genera operating system for Symbolics LISP machines, the classic Mac OS, BeOS, Plan 9, and other operating systems that we can learn from and that would be very useful to have today. Since we're at it, I'd add: Amiga. And I'm not sure, but maybe AREXX also deserves a mention too.
- kragen 7y ago
  What were the interesting ideas in AmigaOS? I don't have any experience with it, except that I played Harmony on it one day around 1990.
  - blihp 7y ago
    I don't recall any when compared to other OS's of the day. The special sauce of the Amiga was its hardware and the games/applications that it enabled. Tools like ARexx and Amiga Basic were better (IMO) than what you got on other platforms, but the OS itself was rather meh. I guess you could say it was rather interesting in the sense that it had preemptive multitasking (years before PCs and Macs would) without memory protection... but that's hardly something you'd want to carry forward to present day.
    - kragen 7y ago
      What was better about AREXX?
      - blihp 7y ago
        ARexx was basically AppleScript before AppleScript existed. It was widely supported by most Amiga productivity software since it was a selling point in the same way AppleScript support is/was for Mac apps in terms of being the de-facto scripting solution on the platform for automating tasks. So if REXX was the dream, ARexx was the realization of that dream on a personal computer.
  - flohofwoe 7y ago
    I think the most interesting aspect of AmigaOS was that it brought features only known from much more expensive workstations into a cheap home computer. To my knowledge there haven't been any outstanding innovations on the software side that haven't been available in other operating systems too, but it did so in a computer that was 10..100x cheaper than a UNIX workstation with a comparable graphical user interface. AmigaOS was more like a stripped down UNIX (preemptive scheduling, but no memory protection/process isolation), MacOS looked like a toy in comparison to be honest, at least from the technical side. In the later years, AmigaOS (or rather its applications) offered a glimpse into a future how applications and the underlying operating system could work together to create a professional working environment, applications didn't feel isolated, there were standards in place how UI applications can be controlled from the command line, how they can be automated through scripting, how applications can talk to each other, and how they can be extended via operating system plugins (for instance if one application added support for a new image format to the operating system, all other application dealing with images automatically gained support for this new image format too). Basically: how can the straightforward automation from the command line brought into the domain of UI applications. Alas, it was a glimpse into a future that would never happen.
the8472 7y ago
> The creators of Plan 9 pushed "everything is a file" to its limits. Isn't linux advancing in similar direction, except that everything is a file descriptor (even processes are now!) instead of a file bound to the directory tree? And technically, everything that is a file descriptor is also a file, thanks to procfs.
- duck2 7y ago
  procfs is "loan-feature" from plan9 :)
- sparkie 7y ago
  I think Linux is going in the direction of "everything is a dbus API" instead. Linux needs it's own "9P," or equivalently practical, if it wants to reverse this trend. DBus, while perhaps not the best IPC mechanism, currently fills the gap. Several of the systemd binaries are there purely to shift from reading and writing files to pushing updates over dbus. See for example systemd-hostnamed.
stiray 7y ago
I get little pink dots around the face when I see the sentences like this: > alternatives to C and C++ such as Python, Rust, Go, Clojure, Haskell, Swift Please advise me. I am just writting a kernel module for hooking kernel calls and I really """hate C""", I would love to do it in python (even better in js or vbscript, logo also comes to my mind - i just love driving a turtle). The input is python, the output .ko. And as normal for kernel module it needs to be rock stable and as fast as possible as the hooked functions are called a lot on the system and cant loose much time there. Can you share a sample please? I am thinking of doing it in bash script by emitting opcodes directly but it seems like it just take too long to dig out all opcodes. Yeah, I know what you think, but it is not assembly, it is bash script. /sarcasm off
- pjmlp 7y ago
  You could start with Circuit Python, Nim, and go from there. I for one get dots when keep seeing people with lack of vision.
  - stiray 7y ago
    Sorry to hear that. I need efficiency and speed with lowest possible memory footprint. You know why? As I dont want you to complain that my software is hard for your system requirements and using it costs you twice the price in your favorite cloud as it is wasting resources that it doesnt need to waste. Not to mention coredumping a kernel from time to time due to a bug in python interpreter. I will just stick to my hated "C". Anyway, you could try to persuade Torvalds to write linux kernel in C. Or rather join the freebsd forums and share the python kernel idea to the people there, I am sure they will apriciate it. Please DO share the responses, as they will surely love your visionary skills, not to mention cloud providers that will earn some extra money... /sarcasm off(again) Anyway not every software is suitable for any task. And at some times you do need knowlidge about what you are doing, including memory (which seems such a "born after 2000" nonpassable barrier as it is so hard to calculate how much memory you need and when to deallocate it at the cost of throwing money in form of cloud resources over the window). /sacracsm really_off
    - 7y ago
scroot 7y ago
> I do wish there was more development in alternative operating systems. This should also go hand in hand with development in alternative computing systems, environments, and architectures as well. Just as the dominance of Unix occurred in part for social/economic/cultural reasons, so too did the current dominant computing architectures. We have examples from the past of interesting attempts (i432, Rekursiv, maybe Oberon etc). Because we have universal data interchange standards today (think XML structures, JSON, hell even TCP/IP itself) we don't have to worry as much about the "compatibility" issues that were a real end user problem in the 80s and 90s. We can and should be experimenting with alternative systems. Maybe open hardware will also help with that.
nwmcsween 7y ago
> C is not a match for modern processor architectures and how modern languages such as Rust address these issues. The basic answer I get when asking this is 'because hardware has changed' which is obvious but avoids the question. Sometimes someone will bring up vector instructions are supported in rust but for a large portion of programming you don't want to vectorize (seriously measure what you think you need to vectorize). Ideally a compiler could compile $lang to word at a time aka SWAR if needed.

jammygit 7y ago

He gave a good talk about SystemD once too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo edit: found a version with better camera angles

sprash 7y ago
I didn't like that talk at all. I disagree with almost everything he says[1]. This talk is much better but some of his criticism are rather pointless because what he wants is a complete new OS design vastly different from UNIX. If he likes Windows/MacOS so much he should just use that. 1.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966321
- Koshkin 7y ago
  I agree that criticizing UNIX for being UNIX is pointless.

pjmlp 7y ago

> I wonder what an operating system for the 2020s would look like given the advances in technology and the lessons learned in the past decade. While not perfect, with their own set of issues, macOS/iOS, Windows (with .NET/UWP) and Android are a couple of steps into that direction. Interesting that you refer Plan 9, but fail to mention Inferno, which was the final vision from the same researchers. Regarding UNIX, one thing that keeps being missed regarding NeXTSTEP and its derived OSes, and to go along your remark, it that for NeXT and Apple, UNIX wasn't never relevant. The UNIX compatibility was just a means to bootstrap the OS and attack the UNIX workstation market, the Objective-C technology stack (now Swift as well) was/is where the real value of the OS was. Anyone using macOS or nowadays WSL as UNIX replacement, is replicating the farmer's story from the talk.

rumanator 7y ago
> Interesting that you refer Plan 9, but fail to mention Inferno, which was the final vision from the same researchers. For the lazy like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
cpach 7y ago
I quite frequently see people mention Plan 9, but seldom Inferno. Does anyone know why Plan 9 became more popular?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Lack of teaching would be one. I bet not many professors bother to dive into it. The documentation is still available, http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/, and you can get it as open source and commercial variants, http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ So it is mostly a matter of actually caring to dive into it. Not only one will discover how many of the Plan 9 design issues got worked on, some of the design ideas that went into Go will be more clear. It is also revealing to dive into Oberon OS linage and then see how some of its design went into ACME on Plan 9, dynamic loading on Inferno or eventually Go's method call and unsafe package design. Instead most get off at the Plan 9 train station.

aruggirello 7y ago

> there were many ideas from VMS, Smalltalk, the Genera operating system for Symbolics LISP machines, the classic Mac OS, BeOS, Plan 9, and other operating systems that we can learn from and that would be very useful to have today. Since we're at it, I'd add: Amiga. And I'm not sure, but maybe AREXX also deserves a mention too.

kragen 7y ago
What were the interesting ideas in AmigaOS? I don't have any experience with it, except that I played Harmony on it one day around 1990.
- blihp 7y ago
  I don't recall any when compared to other OS's of the day. The special sauce of the Amiga was its hardware and the games/applications that it enabled. Tools like ARexx and Amiga Basic were better (IMO) than what you got on other platforms, but the OS itself was rather meh. I guess you could say it was rather interesting in the sense that it had preemptive multitasking (years before PCs and Macs would) without memory protection... but that's hardly something you'd want to carry forward to present day.
  - kragen 7y ago
    What was better about AREXX?
    - blihp 7y ago
      ARexx was basically AppleScript before AppleScript existed. It was widely supported by most Amiga productivity software since it was a selling point in the same way AppleScript support is/was for Mac apps in terms of being the de-facto scripting solution on the platform for automating tasks. So if REXX was the dream, ARexx was the realization of that dream on a personal computer.
- flohofwoe 7y ago
  I think the most interesting aspect of AmigaOS was that it brought features only known from much more expensive workstations into a cheap home computer. To my knowledge there haven't been any outstanding innovations on the software side that haven't been available in other operating systems too, but it did so in a computer that was 10..100x cheaper than a UNIX workstation with a comparable graphical user interface. AmigaOS was more like a stripped down UNIX (preemptive scheduling, but no memory protection/process isolation), MacOS looked like a toy in comparison to be honest, at least from the technical side. In the later years, AmigaOS (or rather its applications) offered a glimpse into a future how applications and the underlying operating system could work together to create a professional working environment, applications didn't feel isolated, there were standards in place how UI applications can be controlled from the command line, how they can be automated through scripting, how applications can talk to each other, and how they can be extended via operating system plugins (for instance if one application added support for a new image format to the operating system, all other application dealing with images automatically gained support for this new image format too). Basically: how can the straightforward automation from the command line brought into the domain of UI applications. Alas, it was a glimpse into a future that would never happen.

the8472 7y ago

> The creators of Plan 9 pushed "everything is a file" to its limits. Isn't linux advancing in similar direction, except that everything is a file descriptor (even processes are now!) instead of a file bound to the directory tree? And technically, everything that is a file descriptor is also a file, thanks to procfs.

duck2 7y ago
procfs is "loan-feature" from plan9 :)
sparkie 7y ago
I think Linux is going in the direction of "everything is a dbus API" instead. Linux needs it's own "9P," or equivalently practical, if it wants to reverse this trend. DBus, while perhaps not the best IPC mechanism, currently fills the gap. Several of the systemd binaries are there purely to shift from reading and writing files to pushing updates over dbus. See for example systemd-hostnamed.

stiray 7y ago

I get little pink dots around the face when I see the sentences like this: > alternatives to C and C++ such as Python, Rust, Go, Clojure, Haskell, Swift Please advise me. I am just writting a kernel module for hooking kernel calls and I really """hate C""", I would love to do it in python (even better in js or vbscript, logo also comes to my mind - i just love driving a turtle). The input is python, the output .ko. And as normal for kernel module it needs to be rock stable and as fast as possible as the hooked functions are called a lot on the system and cant loose much time there. Can you share a sample please? I am thinking of doing it in bash script by emitting opcodes directly but it seems like it just take too long to dig out all opcodes. Yeah, I know what you think, but it is not assembly, it is bash script. /sarcasm off

pjmlp 7y ago
You could start with Circuit Python, Nim, and go from there. I for one get dots when keep seeing people with lack of vision.
- stiray 7y ago
  Sorry to hear that. I need efficiency and speed with lowest possible memory footprint. You know why? As I dont want you to complain that my software is hard for your system requirements and using it costs you twice the price in your favorite cloud as it is wasting resources that it doesnt need to waste. Not to mention coredumping a kernel from time to time due to a bug in python interpreter. I will just stick to my hated "C". Anyway, you could try to persuade Torvalds to write linux kernel in C. Or rather join the freebsd forums and share the python kernel idea to the people there, I am sure they will apriciate it. Please DO share the responses, as they will surely love your visionary skills, not to mention cloud providers that will earn some extra money... /sarcasm off(again) Anyway not every software is suitable for any task. And at some times you do need knowlidge about what you are doing, including memory (which seems such a "born after 2000" nonpassable barrier as it is so hard to calculate how much memory you need and when to deallocate it at the cost of throwing money in form of cloud resources over the window). /sacracsm really_off
  - 7y ago

scroot 7y ago

> I do wish there was more development in alternative operating systems. This should also go hand in hand with development in alternative computing systems, environments, and architectures as well. Just as the dominance of Unix occurred in part for social/economic/cultural reasons, so too did the current dominant computing architectures. We have examples from the past of interesting attempts (i432, Rekursiv, maybe Oberon etc). Because we have universal data interchange standards today (think XML structures, JSON, hell even TCP/IP itself) we don't have to worry as much about the "compatibility" issues that were a real end user problem in the 80s and 90s. We can and should be experimenting with alternative systems. Maybe open hardware will also help with that.

nwmcsween 7y ago

> C is not a match for modern processor architectures and how modern languages such as Rust address these issues. The basic answer I get when asking this is 'because hardware has changed' which is obvious but avoids the question. Sometimes someone will bring up vector instructions are supported in rust but for a large portion of programming you don't want to vectorize (seriously measure what you think you need to vectorize). Ideally a compiler could compile $lang to word at a time aka SWAR if needed.