3 ms·
Yep. *n*x is a victim of its own success. Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, et al built something so much better than most of the competition that it ate the world.
by Turing_Machine 4y ago
Yep. *n*x is a victim of its own success. Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, et al built something so much better than most of the competition that it ate the world.
There have been better ideas since then (including Plan 9) but nothing able to knock *n*x off its perch.
IMO, LMI and Symbolics might have done it, if their offering hadn't required enormously expensive machines (by the standards of the time), while *n*x would run on cheap hardware (again, by the standards of the time).
Perhaps we'll eventually see an innovative OS written in WASM. That's about the only way I see to get around the vendor lock-in (I mean, even Microsoft appears to be converging on a "Windows UI wrapped around a *n*x kernel" model... Apple, of course, has been using a "Mac UI wrapped around a *n*x kernel" for a couple of decades now).
For anyone who hasn't read it, I recommend Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better" essay: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
(original essay and several followups at this link)
- pjmlp 4y agoWSL is running on its own VM. Windows kernel still owns the game. On "Cloud OS" the underlying kernel only matters for classical workloads being pushed onto the cloud. Any language that doesn't depend on POSIX and has a rich library ecosystem, can happily run on top of type 1 hypervisors, which are in a way, the revenge of microkernels.
- anderspitman 4y ago> Any language that doesn't depend on POSIX and has a rich library ecosystem, can happily run on top of type 1 hypervisors That's interesting. Can you run for example Golang programs on ESXI? Go isn't exactly POSIX-free but it also doesn't need all of it.
- pjmlp 4y agoNot on ESXI, but as unikernels, sure, https://github.com/solo-io/unik https://github.com/solo-io/unik https://hermitcore.org/ https://hermitcore.org/ https://github.com/icexin/eggos https://github.com/icexin/eggos https://nanovms.com/ https://nanovms.com/ "Pure Go Unikernels - go metal with TamaGo" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOEl5BCfHv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOEl5BCfHv0
- anderspitman 4y agoAwesome, thanks. Do you have a take on unikernels in general? My main side project at the moment involves trying to use QEMU+WHPX on Windows to sandbox selfhosted services. Long term I think it would be awesome to support unikernels, but I get the feeling a lot of the momentum for them has died down the last couple years.
- eyberg 4y agoI work with NanoVMs and nanos.org can work under both qemu (by default) and deploy to hyper-v under WSL2. Also, nanos.org itself is a go unikernel so we have excellent go support. Also, from parent comment, ops, can deploy to esxi/vsphere perfectly fine.
- ksec 4y ago>Perhaps we'll eventually see an innovative OS written in WASM I hope that doesn't happen. No body wants a Nuclear War and 40 million refugees off the coast of Australia.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago>> No body wants a Nuclear War and 40 million refugees off the coast of Australia. For thise wondering about this reference: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- ahartmetz 4y agoI wouldn't say that Plan 9 has better (basic) ideas than Unix, it's more like a Unix that follows the old ideas even for new things. AFAIU many of the ugly aspects of "contemporary Unix" stem from the Unix wars and later additions by people with less design sense than the Bell Labs group.