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After reading all 4 parts (up to part IV), this is pretty underwhelming. The author makes a lot of noise about reinventing OS and mentions "heresy" a lot, but
by theamk 5y ago
After reading all 4 parts (up to part IV), this is pretty underwhelming.
The author makes a lot of noise about reinventing OS and mentions "heresy" a lot, but his main idea is a non-preemptable thread which runs an event loop. You know, like Erlang's BEAM; or running one boost::asio event loop per core; or Windows 3.11; or, going back to embedded examples, using nesC/TinyOS.
Additionally, there are also a lot of random ideas which have no explanation and have obvious known problems that need to be addressed: "vast majority" of processes is shared-nothing; non-stop record/replay debugging on every API call; same kernel API for devices with 32 KB and 32 GB of RAM; "API groups" which are replacing libraries; optional preemption. One can certainly make them work, but this is non-trivial, and author does not provide any answers (actually he just does not mention possible problems at all)
I feel that the author maybe had some ideas, but run out of steam? Or maybe the comments caused him to re-think the his ideas? Either way, the last post was in 2019, so I guess we will never know.
I am surprised ithare.com would publish such incomplete / partially incorrect series.