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I have tried to contribute to the Linux kernel development in the past, but I found it to be a strong inner circle of seasoned devs. The fact that they were sti

by eyegor 5y ago

I have tried to contribute to the Linux kernel development in the past, but I found it to be a strong inner circle of seasoned devs. The fact that they were still using mailing lists instead of github/gitlab/etc to keep track of development was painful enough, but they were also hostile to asking for documentation on inner modules. I'm not sure how it will progress when they retire or die off.

lproven 5y ago
I don't have anything to add to your overall point – I'm sure you're right. I just wanted to address two smaller ones: > The fact that they were still using mailing lists In my personal experience, going back some 30 years or so online with my own personal paid email account – which is still live and still works – I find that most people I've worked or interacted with who dislike using email for workflow or other important comms do not know how to use email effectively. Strange as it may seem, this now applies to the developers of most email clients and online email services. Email and mailing lists are remarkably powerful and capable tools, if used properly. Most people do not use it or them properly. I have yet to see anything else by anyone that is an improvement in every way on email. > I'm not sure how it will progress when they retire or die off. TBPH, as a Linux user and professional, I rather hope it does not. Linux is an amazingly useful tool, but OTOH it's now, in and of itself, a vast hairball of technical debt. The traditional UNIX model itself is. It is long past time that we should have moved past it on to better things. There have been many attempts but none have ever achieved critical mass. At the rate things are going it looks quite likely that our technological civilization will collapse due to out-of-control global warming and the ongoing and accelerating mass extinction event. As the parent of a 2YO I very much hope I am wrong. But if I am and it doesn't, the world needs better tech, and a ½ century old UNIX clone already does not really cut it today. If Linux and all the other monolithic Unixes die when their dev teams die, we'll have to move on to newer, smaller, simpler systems that a new generation of programmers can actually read from top to bottom, understand, and do useful work on. If monolithic Unices become the mid-21st-century COBOL, just kept around for a few old systems and only critical bugs patched, that will be a big win for us all.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Linux is an amazingly useful tool, but OTOH it's now, in and of itself, a vast hairball of technical debt. The traditional UNIX model itself is. Linux, perhaps, but "the model"? I'm not so sure. > It is long past time that we should have moved past it on to better things. That's what they said about SQL RDBMSes too. > There have been many attempts but none have ever achieved critical mass. Maybe for good reason. > the world needs better tech, and a ½ century old UNIX clone already does not really cut it today. That's what they... Eh, I'm repeating myself. > If Linux and all the other monolithic Unixes die when their dev teams die, we'll have to move on to newer, smaller, simpler systems that a new generation of programmers can actually read from top to bottom, understand, and do useful work on. That's probably what they... No, not quite. But it may have been what Linus thought -- at least, judging from what he made. > If monolithic Unices become the mid-21st-century COBOL, just kept around for a few old systems and only critical bugs patched, that will be a big win for us all. I doubt that'll happen. I'll be happy if they become the mid-21st-century SQL -- which I suppose will also be still going strong.
  - lproven 5y ago
    I know it's an unpopular view. :-) But the alternatives are there. The fast-headers thing put me in mind of the way that Plan 9 changed the C language, not only formalising indentation and things, but to forbid nested #includes, which apparently vastly reduced compilation times. Inferno moved on to largely supplant C with Limbo, which is one of the ancestors of Go. I'd say Go, D and Rust all show that there's demand for a newer, better C and that C++ is not it. Apple's xnu is widely held not to be a true microkernel because of its big in-kernel Unix server, but Minix 3 is... and for all that Minix 3 is not quite there yet, QNX shows this is possible and doable and performant. It's 2022. We have boxes with terabytes of RAM now and hardware-assisted virtualisation even on £5 ARM boards. We don't need a total clean-sweep replacement; we can virtualise the old stuff and slot in underneath something smaller, simpler and cleaner that mere mortals can understand in less than a lifetime. 3D Xpoint memory is on the market now and makes non-volatile RAM doable, multiple orders of magnitude faster and longer-lasting than flash memory. Computers don't even need drives any more: we could just have a few terabytes of persistent memory, and no more shuffling stuff into memory. True single-level store is doable now. Who needs files when everything is in RAM forever? ISTM that much of the computer industry has its eyes on the ground now, and is just shuffling round and round in the same old groove, rather than trying new stuff. In the middle of my working life there were dozens of exciting new OSes trying to do things differently. Now, we have 30 million lines of C instead, and need a billion-dollar industry to aim all those many eyes at all those many bugs. As Molnár himself said: “Don't forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away."

by eyegor 5y ago

lproven 5y ago

I don't have anything to add to your overall point – I'm sure you're right. I just wanted to address two smaller ones: > The fact that they were still using mailing lists In my personal experience, going back some 30 years or so online with my own personal paid email account – which is still live and still works – I find that most people I've worked or interacted with who dislike using email for workflow or other important comms do not know how to use email effectively. Strange as it may seem, this now applies to the developers of most email clients and online email services. Email and mailing lists are remarkably powerful and capable tools, if used properly. Most people do not use it or them properly. I have yet to see anything else by anyone that is an improvement in every way on email. > I'm not sure how it will progress when they retire or die off. TBPH, as a Linux user and professional, I rather hope it does not. Linux is an amazingly useful tool, but OTOH it's now, in and of itself, a vast hairball of technical debt. The traditional UNIX model itself is. It is long past time that we should have moved past it on to better things. There have been many attempts but none have ever achieved critical mass. At the rate things are going it looks quite likely that our technological civilization will collapse due to out-of-control global warming and the ongoing and accelerating mass extinction event. As the parent of a 2YO I very much hope I am wrong. But if I am and it doesn't, the world needs better tech, and a ½ century old UNIX clone already does not really cut it today. If Linux and all the other monolithic Unixes die when their dev teams die, we'll have to move on to newer, smaller, simpler systems that a new generation of programmers can actually read from top to bottom, understand, and do useful work on. If monolithic Unices become the mid-21st-century COBOL, just kept around for a few old systems and only critical bugs patched, that will be a big win for us all.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Linux is an amazingly useful tool, but OTOH it's now, in and of itself, a vast hairball of technical debt. The traditional UNIX model itself is. Linux, perhaps, but "the model"? I'm not so sure. > It is long past time that we should have moved past it on to better things. That's what they said about SQL RDBMSes too. > There have been many attempts but none have ever achieved critical mass. Maybe for good reason. > the world needs better tech, and a ½ century old UNIX clone already does not really cut it today. That's what they... Eh, I'm repeating myself. > If Linux and all the other monolithic Unixes die when their dev teams die, we'll have to move on to newer, smaller, simpler systems that a new generation of programmers can actually read from top to bottom, understand, and do useful work on. That's probably what they... No, not quite. But it may have been what Linus thought -- at least, judging from what he made. > If monolithic Unices become the mid-21st-century COBOL, just kept around for a few old systems and only critical bugs patched, that will be a big win for us all. I doubt that'll happen. I'll be happy if they become the mid-21st-century SQL -- which I suppose will also be still going strong.
- lproven 5y ago
  I know it's an unpopular view. :-) But the alternatives are there. The fast-headers thing put me in mind of the way that Plan 9 changed the C language, not only formalising indentation and things, but to forbid nested #includes, which apparently vastly reduced compilation times. Inferno moved on to largely supplant C with Limbo, which is one of the ancestors of Go. I'd say Go, D and Rust all show that there's demand for a newer, better C and that C++ is not it. Apple's xnu is widely held not to be a true microkernel because of its big in-kernel Unix server, but Minix 3 is... and for all that Minix 3 is not quite there yet, QNX shows this is possible and doable and performant. It's 2022. We have boxes with terabytes of RAM now and hardware-assisted virtualisation even on £5 ARM boards. We don't need a total clean-sweep replacement; we can virtualise the old stuff and slot in underneath something smaller, simpler and cleaner that mere mortals can understand in less than a lifetime. 3D Xpoint memory is on the market now and makes non-volatile RAM doable, multiple orders of magnitude faster and longer-lasting than flash memory. Computers don't even need drives any more: we could just have a few terabytes of persistent memory, and no more shuffling stuff into memory. True single-level store is doable now. Who needs files when everything is in RAM forever? ISTM that much of the computer industry has its eyes on the ground now, and is just shuffling round and round in the same old groove, rather than trying new stuff. In the middle of my working life there were dozens of exciting new OSes trying to do things differently. Now, we have 30 million lines of C instead, and need a billion-dollar industry to aim all those many eyes at all those many bugs. As Molnár himself said: “Don't forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away."