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The monoculture around Linux is actually a problem. Linux' design is suboptimal in many ways, particularly how drivers run with full privilege. (For a sobering
by pcwalton 7y ago
The monoculture around Linux is actually a problem. Linux' design is suboptimal in many ways, particularly how drivers run with full privilege. (For a sobering look at how this impacts security, watch [1].) It's unfortunate that the monoculture of Linux is going to make this very difficult to change.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBVXxZDVQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBVXxZDVQY
- zzzcpan 7y agoBut it's not monoculture that's the problem here, it's architecture. Different OS with similar architecture, like FreeBSD, can't solve those problems. The same way reimplementing Chromium in Firefox can't fix anything.
- pcwalton 7y agoThere are significant architectural differences in components of Blink, WebKit, Gecko. For example, the CSS style recalculation is very different—Blink uses a single-threaded engine in C++, WebKit uses a C++ JIT, and Gecko does multithreaded style recalculation in Rust. It would be hard to do WebKit or Gecko's approach with the current Chromium governance, because WebKit's CSS JIT uses parts of JavaScriptCore (per my understanding) and because Chromium doesn't currently allow Rust code.
- zzzcpan 7y agoSure, but not impactful enough to matter in practice. FreeBSD can claim a lot of architectural differences too and yet they don't solve the problems you were talking about. And the actually different OSes that can help with those problems are not really usable except for some niche use cases.