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BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed
- ianai 3y agoTalk about things I’d want to bring back if I were suddenly a mega millionaire or billionaire.
- deviantbit 3y agoYou really wouldn't. I developed code for Coherent, if anyone remembers that UNIX clone. I honestly never want that to come back.
- macintux 3y agoYou should chime in on this Coherent (nascent) thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38594866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38594866
- scruffyherder 3y agoI dont suppose you have coherent 8086/80286 at all? I should have ordered it as a kid but I'd been told so many times to never trust mailorder. It still bugs me I didn't send in the $99.99
- deviantbit 3y agoWe had it on 286, but most of where I lived was on the 68k. I never bought a personal license. We had a license w/ source. I had an Amiga at home back in those days.
- frutiger 3y agoDoesn’t this sort of exist today with Cygwin/MSYS2/Git Bash/etc?
- scruffyherder 3y agonot really, the exe's are a.out so it's more like EMX. It's broken up like services more like HURD, and extended to 32bit on Win16. It's far more cooler being able to run on Windows 3.1
- frutiger 3y agoSure, but from a user perspective? It says you could run vi/gcc/etc. in BoW, which you can easily do. I don't know why GGP would want to spend millions (surely would cost way more than millions) nor billions recreating something that already exists?
- ianai 3y agoReally, to do something different and that might move the needle to new possibilities. The *BSDs and Linux seem like they permanently miss just a few core elements to be mass adoptable. Mass adoption would benefit everyone through things like competition but also just different features. Like imagine being able to zfs send incremental backups of your daily drivers and gaming boxes. Or if plan9 had really taken off and had real market share. Idk, just feels like we've been stuck in a place for the last few decades.
- anthk 3y agoYou are using plan9's UTF8 and 9p in lots of products.
- scruffyherder 3y agoYou're looking too close to the trees gcc/vi instead of the BSD forest. BOW's only weakness is its single user mode, more so a limitation of being a Win16. If it'd been pushed harder to a NT service/client/server DLL it'd have been a much bigger player. It's all moot, Pink/taligent died, Virtual Machines is where everyone runs their stuff these days, OS/2 had the driver/disk/filesystem stuff done right.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
- doublerabbit 3y agoThis is where we should be, native support of Linux on Windows and native support of Windows on Linux. Executables should be cross-compatible, we somehow ended up in a reality of monopolistic -- 1v1. I would enjoy it to break free at some point but I doubt it. Just about everything now is it's own garden with a tiny API gate to allow you access to the minor features of the whole collection. I am aware of WSL and the likes but, it's taken many years to get that far.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Grimburger 3y ago> Executables should be cross-compatible So cosmopolitan? https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
- Dalewyn 3y agoAs mentioned in a thread yesterday (and justifiably memed often in general)[1], Win32 is the most stable environment to target in Linux. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585729
- partomniscient 3y agoBut they should all break on MacOS and refuse to be cross-compiled for Windows/Linux? I agree with your idealism, but I think the best we're going to get is more or less what we have now, otherwise we end up in the space where program x works with o/s y version z subsystem q, but not the other combinations you'd hope for. I'm still annoyed that we don't design enough for the future that when a new O/S version/architecture gets released there isn't more effort to save the past. We have a perfectly serviceable relatively recent printer (4-5 years old?) that my wife now can't use because her new Mac which replaced her 12 year old mac, now doesn't have a driver for it, because there are no Sonoma versions of it. I think we err on the wrong side of creating waste at the expense of not doing (admittedly annoying) work. To get back on topic, this was the point of subsytems - you managed to hold onto and get access to the past you liked from within your walled garden.
- Teever 3y agoTotally. I don't want to derail the conversation too much but when I look at what Notch has become since he became a billionaire it's frankly pathetic. Princes & Kings Isn't it strange how princes and kings, and clowns that caper in sawdust rings, and common people, like you and me, are builders for eternity? Each is given a list of rules; a shapeless mass; a bag of tools. And each must fashion, ere life is flown, A stumbling block, or a Stepping-Stone. ― R. Lee Sharpe
- minton 3y agoWhat happened to Notch?
- twisteriffic 3y agoBit down on about every right wing conspiracy theory you can come up with.
- low_tech_love 3y agoNothing special, I think that’s what he/she meant.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoI assume his tendency to say things that upset a particularly sensitive political milieu, but I can't say that's what they meant for certain.
- Teever 3y agoIs that really how you interpreted my comment? My critique of Notch is that he doesn't do cool stuff anymore. Stuff like that weird space game that he was talking about making, or something like BSD on windows.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoAh OK. I guess I interpreted it differently because I don't follow him as a person. So my exposure to him is usually people complaining about something he said, or someone saying what he said was based. I know very little of his projects after Minecraft, so I just used the info I have. I dunno why you'd be sore about it, the guy already paid his dues? Again though, bot familiar eith what he goes around promising.
- rnd0 3y agoI'd go for a full-fledged BSD subsystem, myself. From what he wrote on the blog it sounds like this would be a pain in the butt to use for anything substantial.
- scruffyherder 3y agoI was able to cross compile from windows to BOW https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/12/12/cross-compiling-to-bsd-on-windows-bow-from-win32/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/12/12/cross-compiling-to-bsd-o...
- wkat4242 3y agoAnother interesting thing to explore would be colinux which was a bit similar to WSL but third party.
- scruffyherder 3y agoprobably too mainstream, there was other hacked ways of running linux on windows using debuggers and other memory map hacks...
- exikyut 3y agoI honestly wouldn't mind learning what these looked like! I wasn't really aware of the long tail of the scene back in the day.
- pram 3y agoThere was also SFU which was a first party “BSD on Windows” I had to use it in the past and it’s genuinely awful. MobaXterm was the best before WSL (imo) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
- scruffyherder 3y agoSFU replaced the posix subsystem with an OpenBSD port and more capable thing for NT/2000 etc. SFU was so much later to the game, while BOW ran on Windows 3.1 which would have been great had it had far bigger appeal as you could just run it on such lesser machines. The best part being no formatting, no device drivers, or changes to the OS at all. I just copied over to my PS/2, and was playing hack 1.03 in no time.
- toast0 3y agoHey. Microsoft's SFU[1] is alive and well, back when I was running servers getting DDoSed by chargen reflection, as far as I can tell, most of the reflectors were running chargen from SFU. [1] Well, Microsoft published it, but IIRC, another company developed it.
- EvanAnderson 3y agoI had good luck compiling and running command line apps on SFU (nee Interix) back in the early 2000's. GNU autoconf had (has?) support for Interix as a target. I always wanted a distribution of Windows that booted character mode and ran the Interix userland.
- gafage 3y agoWhat's that irc client?
- scruffyherder 3y agoI just cobbled together IRC 2.9. I don't see why anything else more useful could build. Ive also built Apache 1.3.1 and gotten it to run. https://archive.org/details/apache131_for_BOW https://archive.org/details/apache131_for_BOW It's really cool how BOW can totally use winsock, and bridge that gap of Unix networking tools on Windows 3.1
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- User23 3y agoAnd here I thought Blue Screen of Death and hints for how to handle it.
- epcoa 3y ago“OS/2 is the dominant workstation product” In what universe other than maybe some banks was that the case? 1995 was the era of the commercial UNIX workstation.
- lacrimacida 3y ago[flagged]
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoReader mode.
- jimmaswell 3y agoI enjoyed them.
- mlvljr 3y ago[dead]
- Gabrys1 3y agoThat's what happens when everyone runs their own site instead of posting things on big name social media.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agonoscript
- rnd0 3y ago>It drove me away, sorry I could not read that important message because I could’t be bothered with those animated snowflakes. I'd hazard to say that it's not the snowflakes on his site that are the problem. It's a non-commercial, personal site. If you couldn't figure out a work-around (eg reader mode, as someone else suggested) then that's on you. >Yes, its their website, it’s their right That's the bottom line. There's plenty of other sites out there that will happily cater to your offended sensibilities.
- mid-kid 3y agoI just think they're neat.
- LocalH 3y agoSpoilsport.
- RachelF 3y agoWindows NT 3.x and 4 were Posix complaint. In the mid-1990's there were a few vendors that sold products that let you run full X11 apps on NT. Microsoft bought and extinguished the largest one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix
- a-dub 3y agothis. it was pretty straightforward to port to NT modulo a few quirks around shared memory, mmap and fork/exec. edit. oh yeah, line endings. that sucked. that said, nt had way better multithreading support.
- pjmlp 3y agoDuring university days, had NT really properly supported POSIX, I probably would never bothered with that "Linux Unleashed with Slackware 2.0 CD-ROM" book. If Microsoft could tell the future, they would have improved POSIX, instead of killing it, and then briging a Linux VM into the OS.
- vkazanov 3y agoMicrosoft did everything, like everything and more, to kill every alternative platform on the planet. Hedging their bets with half-hearted posix support was part of that effort. If not for that MSN vs Internet fiasco, they would succeed.
- pjmlp 3y agoI never liked that point of view, because while it is true they did their part, the OEMs and consumers also did theirs. Also as seen nowadays by many FAANG efforts, "do no evil" marketing stunts, Playstation and Nintendo with their exclusive deals, they are not alone in the desire to achieve that goal. Ironically, while UNIX won the server room, the Linux wars replacing the UNIX wars, is kind of what killed the desktop for most consumers, now enjoying the Linux kernel via Android, ChromeOS, and the free beer version of them, versus what OEMs make available isn't the same anyway. Or one pays what is seen as the Apple tax in countries where wages aren't at the same level as North America.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 3y agoThe author reached out to Hiroshi Oota on github, who said they created it to use emacs on Windows. Not sure why it's not in the article, but figure there might be a reason so won't link it.
- guessbest 3y ago[flagged]
- scruffyherder 3y agoyes I was hoping to do an update after I had help finding the author, and to see if there was any potential of an update. It's late breaking & live. And it seems all the engagement is here not on the blog so I didn't see this as I was sleeping.
- sydbarrett74 3y agoThis is only of historical interest, but still a cool find.
- DeathArrow 3y agoNot sure that NT kernel is inferior to UNIX/POSIX. It was by David Cutler modelled after VMS, which was state of the art at one point.
- krylon 3y agoThe kernel, I've been told by people more knowledgeable about this things than myself, is a work of beauty. But the layers and layers of Win32 that sit on top of it do a great job of covering that up.
- ladyanita22 3y agoWell, the benchmarks don't tell that.
- krylon 3y agoYou know what they say about benchmarks... ;-) I prefer Linux, but performance is not my main grief about Windows.
- temac 3y agoI fail to see what is particularly brillant about this kernel. Drivers are convoluted. IRQL is convoluted. The supposed distniction between "kernel" and executive has little definition and is convoluted (esp given it duplicates somes primitives for no real reasons). The HAL was a false good idea and Cultler himself agree with that. The network stack splitted betwen user and kernel space makes no sense (and the story behind this, including afd.sys, is ridiculous) It's a not great / not terrible kernel, like most are (Linux included)
- krylon 3y agoI rely entirely on hearsay. You sound like you know more about the NT kernel's internals than I do, so I'll take your word for it.
- milutinovici 3y ago
- ValtteriL 3y agoTurn off those falling leaves
- burrish 3y agohaha my dear, those are snowflakes! how silly
- lproven 3y agoSeparate thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38581362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38581362 @dang, candidate for merging?