Comment by rbanffy
11 years ago
I've said this before, but it's worth saying it again. It's disappointing the two most popular OSs are a Unix derivative and the bastard child of VMS.
11 years ago
I've said this before, but it's worth saying it again. It's disappointing the two most popular OSs are a Unix derivative and the bastard child of VMS.
The problem isn't so much Unix, but rather that we have largely failed to evolve it since the days of AT&T System III. The Bell Labs people kept working on Research Unix up to V9 with plenty of great features (like V9 IPC streams) that were never replicated anywhere else, before moving on to the ultimate culmination of these ideas in the form of Plan 9 and Inferno.
Meanwhile Linux has always been a boring SysV Unix clone that only occasionally ripped some features (and in a questionable manner) like procfs, sysfs, epoll, signalfd so you don't have to do the self-pipe trick, inotify, cgroups and namespaces. Stuff that competing systems often did much better.
The BSDs have been quicker to do more novel things, but by far the only two modern Unices to get the memo are DragonFly BSD and Solaris/illumos.
Go look at Genode, one of the most exciting things in OS development I've seen for a long time:
http://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index
It's a secure microkernelly capability-based OS where each process is basically a virtualised hypervisor; it can run a conventional OS as a user process, but it's also got a Unix-like native personality if you want it. I believe it's nearly self-hosting.
It is an interesting side note that Richard Miller, who hacks on Plan 9, was part of the Taos OS scene.
Even more interesting that he was on the frontpage just last night! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9801745
8 replies →
It could be worse; it wasn't very long ago when the dominant "operating system" was DOS, for example.
I personally would love to have a modern Lisp machine. Alas, having lived through the 90's, I'm glad that we at least have Unix. Perhaps someday everything will be unikernels.
> it wasn't very long ago when the dominant "operating system" was DOS, for example.
The bastard child of CP/M...
The bastard child of TOPS-10...
It is. Even worse, Microsoft got a designer of an OS (VMS) that practically never failed to build the new one that failed all the time (sighs). Least they learned a few things from VMS...