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This works great as long as you have exactly one program running on your computer and fully trust its developers to not mess up your hardware or lose your data.

by hmry 2y ago

uticus 2y ago
I think this is the biggest argument for an OS. The OS is a virtual Nanny or representative of yourself. It does what you would do if you could control the machine: provide security for data, keep code from running through fences, and ensure multiple simultaneous routines don't block each other.
- sophacles 2y ago
  If you're that concerned about it, go grab a raspberry pi and get cracking on your own compute environment. You don't actually need all the OS stuff as you keep arguing, so go make it so. Of course you're ignoring the fact that linux is open source, so you can go make the OS do what you want it to - that's one path you could take. Or you could just write code for the rpi and build up all that stuff yourself, no problem. The only person stopping you from doing this is yourself.... go do it and show us the "no-os" way.
  - uticus 2y ago
    I think you read my previous comment as an argument against what I was replying to. I was actually agreeing with them and acknowledging they have a great point.
    - sophacles 2y ago
      I did misread, thanks for the clarification.
flohofwoe 2y ago
This sort of protection is not a requirement for an operation system though. For instance AmigaOS had full pre-emptive multitasking, device drivers, a windowing UI, a filesystem and all sorts of user-facing features expected of a modern operating system. But it had no memory protection, no "kernel mode" or filesystem access rights, the hardware was fully documented and accessible to all code running on the machine. Each program could easily take over the entire machine and do literally anything (including destroying all your data). Multi-user capability and the idea that a user only has limited access to the computer was really a mainframe thing that leaked into personal computing during the 90s.

This works great as long as you have exactly one program running on your computer and fully trust its developers to not mess up your hardware or lose your data.

by hmry 2y ago

This works great as long as you have exactly one program running on your computer and fully trust its developers to not mess up your hardware or lose your data.

uticus 2y ago

I think this is the biggest argument for an OS. The OS is a virtual Nanny or representative of yourself. It does what you would do if you could control the machine: provide security for data, keep code from running through fences, and ensure multiple simultaneous routines don't block each other.

sophacles 2y ago
If you're that concerned about it, go grab a raspberry pi and get cracking on your own compute environment. You don't actually need all the OS stuff as you keep arguing, so go make it so. Of course you're ignoring the fact that linux is open source, so you can go make the OS do what you want it to - that's one path you could take. Or you could just write code for the rpi and build up all that stuff yourself, no problem. The only person stopping you from doing this is yourself.... go do it and show us the "no-os" way.
- uticus 2y ago
  I think you read my previous comment as an argument against what I was replying to. I was actually agreeing with them and acknowledging they have a great point.
  - sophacles 2y ago
    I did misread, thanks for the clarification.

flohofwoe 2y ago

This sort of protection is not a requirement for an operation system though. For instance AmigaOS had full pre-emptive multitasking, device drivers, a windowing UI, a filesystem and all sorts of user-facing features expected of a modern operating system. But it had no memory protection, no "kernel mode" or filesystem access rights, the hardware was fully documented and accessible to all code running on the machine. Each program could easily take over the entire machine and do literally anything (including destroying all your data). Multi-user capability and the idea that a user only has limited access to the computer was really a mainframe thing that leaked into personal computing during the 90s.