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What were they doing? From all I can tell they require to hold down the shift key a lot, other than that it's hard to find good information how they offered any

What were they doing? From all I can tell they require to hold down the shift key a lot, other than that it's hard to find good information how they offered anything not offered by contemporary ecosystems. Or how they offered a better set of tradeoffs in some situations than we can have today.

jstimpfle 3y ago
A fundamental problem that I see today ist that most systems end up being either too rigid or too unstructured. We always want guardrails but then we need ways to remove them. What sounds good in theory or looks amazing on a demo often becomes impractical in a realistic development setting. (There is a hint on something like that wrt. Mesa/Cedar on wikipedia. FWIW -- I've obviously never used it myself)
pjmlp 3y ago
Easy to find out when one cares, all the stuff is on Bitsavers and Computer History Museum sessions. A small taste, "Eric Bier demonstrates Cedar" https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102781041 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10278104... Full graphics workstation in 1980's, implementated in a systems programming language using reference counting, with a tracing GC as cycle collector, with an object model partially implemented years later as OLE/COM.
- jstimpfle 3y ago
  Watching the video, thanks. But back to my question, what of those is missing today?
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Systems programming in a memory safe language with automatic memory management, across the whole OS, with a type safe ABI supporting dynamic loading, as starting point. Swift is the closest to it, and it is still not widely adopted across Apple ecosystem, although as per CppCon 2023's Apple talk they even have plans to push it into the kernel (long term).
    - jstimpfle 3y ago
      "Across the whole OS" is nothing special, it just means there hasn't been enough interest by diverse enough users of the OS. This is a research system, which is different from an OS supporting a huge diversity of ecosystems through the past 3 decades or so. There are different forces at play. I'm sure there are quite a few systems worked on by lone developers today that make for a nice and smooth demo. The hard part is getting adoption and making it ergonomic and performant for a variety of uses, not just demo stuff.

jstimpfle 3y ago

A fundamental problem that I see today ist that most systems end up being either too rigid or too unstructured. We always want guardrails but then we need ways to remove them. What sounds good in theory or looks amazing on a demo often becomes impractical in a realistic development setting. (There is a hint on something like that wrt. Mesa/Cedar on wikipedia. FWIW -- I've obviously never used it myself)

pjmlp 3y ago

Easy to find out when one cares, all the stuff is on Bitsavers and Computer History Museum sessions. A small taste, "Eric Bier demonstrates Cedar" https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102781041 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10278104... Full graphics workstation in 1980's, implementated in a systems programming language using reference counting, with a tracing GC as cycle collector, with an object model partially implemented years later as OLE/COM.

jstimpfle 3y ago
Watching the video, thanks. But back to my question, what of those is missing today?
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Systems programming in a memory safe language with automatic memory management, across the whole OS, with a type safe ABI supporting dynamic loading, as starting point. Swift is the closest to it, and it is still not widely adopted across Apple ecosystem, although as per CppCon 2023's Apple talk they even have plans to push it into the kernel (long term).
  - jstimpfle 3y ago
    "Across the whole OS" is nothing special, it just means there hasn't been enough interest by diverse enough users of the OS. This is a research system, which is different from an OS supporting a huge diversity of ecosystems through the past 3 decades or so. There are different forces at play. I'm sure there are quite a few systems worked on by lone developers today that make for a nice and smooth demo. The hard part is getting adoption and making it ergonomic and performant for a variety of uses, not just demo stuff.