Comment by runjake
20 hours ago
> Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)
Current macOS user, and former NT kernel dabbler and VMS user here. That's highly debatable.
On the kernel side, Windows is still filled with legacy VMS-isms. Eg: Object Manager (object/resource model), named objects, handles, how processes and threads work, vmem, scheduling etc etc
On the userspace side, Windows is still filled with legacy DOS-isms.
Don't me wrong, I love the underlying Windows OS, despite its many quirks, but it's filled with perhaps even more legacy cruft and definitely isn't any sort of step above anything else.
I also don't believe anyone actually runs macOS in a UNIX-compliant configuration. Rather, it's a checkbox on some RFP and nobody is clued into why it's actually there, because all the people that did know have since retired.
What lineage of OS predates both DOS and VMS? :-)
As the popular phrase goes: "It's legacy, all the way down". What matters is what's left of those legacies in current revs.
In both cases: "Quite a bit", but I wish the base Windows OS would evolve away from legacy as much as macOS has. Start with eliminating drive letters.
> Start with eliminating drive letters.
Drive letters are there for the presentation layer and of course backwards compat. Windows refers to them using device paths internally. You can too, if you wish.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/file-pa...