Android is a great NEGATIVE example of the Unix philosophy! The code is based on the Linux kernel, which might make you think it's Unix, but isn't Unix [1] An

Android is a great NEGATIVE example of the Unix philosophy! The code is based on the Linux kernel, which might make you think it's Unix, but isn't Unix [1] An OS is where 3 things meet: code, data, and people. AKA apps, files, and users. AKA CPU, storage, and networking when viewed from hardware (in the old days, you'd have terminals and serial ports, not Internet) I'd argue that (if you take away the historical "hairs"), Unix is a minimal and efficient implementation of those ideas. It's efficient enough to build heterogeneous "platforms" on top -- Lisp, JVM, JavaScript, Python, etc. Databases, hardware virtual machines, the entire modern cloud The shebang line is basically "polymorphism" for those runtimes -- everything looks like ./foo arg1 arg2 The args are often unstructured files that you share between different programs -- Android breaks from that design in many, many ways - Applications are written to the Java runtime, not to the OS - They written in Java or Kotlin. Escaping to C++ is a "special" thing, you use the "NDK" for that - It doesn't expose raw files to applications, or at least it seems apps can't really share files. It uses its own security model, not Unix security (which was almost certainly necessary!) Hm I clicked on the original link, and Rob Pike said it better: The very idea of a "Files app" is high on my list of world-defeating idiocies perpetrated by technology. - It doesn't use Unix IPC, it has its own "binder" mechanism between apps. Although most modern Unixes don't find it enough either - https://roxanageambasu.github.io/publications/eurosys2016posix.pdf https://roxanageambasu.github.io/publications/eurosys2016pos... So Android is more like a "monoglot" operating system on top of Unix. It's just using Linux as a bunch of device drivers basically (Makes me think of the quote from the 90's regarding browser/JVM: "Windows should just be a bunch of poorly debugged device drivers", and that rhymes a bit with how Android turned out.) --- I think the cloud is missing the "Unix" layer, i.e. a good factoring of mechanism and policy, C and shell, which you can build other platforms on top of. I'll refer to my own post: Kubernetes is our generation's Multics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27903720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27903720 The cloud is kind of an incoherent architectural mess -- it doesn't really have the code / data / users model. It basically has the incoherent "Files app" architecture, as Pike says What's code in the cloud? How do I invoke it? What are files? What are users? There's a million answers, and it causes a lot of work for us programmers. Most app code seems to be papering over the differences between different representations of these fundamental things, which ultimately makes them slow and unreliable [1] Incidentally, Android is also not GNU/Linux -- it's the Linux kernel, without GNU at the platform layer