Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
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Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
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Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#2I know people tend to hold up POSIX compliance as something that's of utmost importance, but from my conversations with Bionic's maintainers, there's an awful lot of cruft and poor designs in some of the POSIX APIs.
Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#3I know people tend to hold up POSIX compliance as something that's of utmost importance, but from my conversations with Bionic's maintainers, there's an awful lot of cruft and poor designs in some of the POSIX APIs.
I don't know enough about the POSIX APIs to comment with any authority on that, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a long running software project that has been required to stay largely backwards compatible as it evolved has become crufty.
However, the importance of POSIX isn't really to do with specific design details, but rather because it aids in software portability. This is still a desirable trait. In other words, the answer is to design a better portability solution (N.B. For anyone thinking of posting it, the XKCD standards link is not relevant here, you'd want to design something that had support from key stakeholders before it was implemented, there's no requirement to fragment the market).
Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#4I know people tend to hold up POSIX compliance as something that's of utmost importance, but from my conversations with Bionic's maintainers, there's an awful lot of cruft and poor designs in some of the POSIX APIs.
POSIX compliance is important if you value portability - especially for business critical systems (e.g. you want your bank's transaction processing data to work on IBM Z/Series's UNIX, whatever Linux distro they use, and say... SunOS).
My main takeaway from the article is POSIX is too antiquated and anemic as a "system API" for modern-day use - however I'm surprised the article doesn't seem to touch upon POSIX shortcomings instead being a consequence of the UNIX design philosophy - a strong personal concern of mine regards UNIX-like's future development course - should we continue to uphold "everything is a file", ioctl(), and piping text-streams as the best way to build an OS?
Curiously, the article chides POSIX for lacking modern abstractions (specifically, graphics) but I disagree - POSIX would be a disaster if it included anything like OpenGL or Cairo (case-in-point: Win32 is tightly coupled with GDI and now we're paying the price by being physically unable to do deep-color graphics in Win32 without serious hacks) - I think that (to paraphrase one of the UNIX philosophies) "small APIs that do one thing and do it well" applies to POSIX (as it does process and system management, and nothing else) and it has worked.
Coming from a modern Windows developer experience - I think there's a great deal to be learned from the failures of the vaporware "object-oriented operating system" concepts of the mid-1990s and how the concept has been resurrected in the form of PowerShell object-piping and WinMD today and should be explored as the next possible step in OS design at a fundamental level - not just as a shim on top as it is with Windows.
That said, UNIX and GNU/Linux have always evolved in small steps - pretty much every great-leap-forward is doomed to failure or endless ideological controversy (see `systemd`) so maybe UNIX-like OSes are not the right place to test new design concepts - but some new OS will - and eventually that OS will supersede Linux in the way many people believe Rust will replace C++.
Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#5I know people tend to hold up POSIX compliance as something that's of utmost importance, but from my conversations with Bionic's maintainers, there's an awful lot of cruft and poor designs in some of the POSIX APIs.
Google should have innovated or they should have complied. Instead they built on POSIX's shoulders and then diverged only enough to harm portability. Not cool.
Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#6I know people tend to hold up POSIX compliance as something that's of utmost importance, but from my conversations with Bionic's maintainers, there's an awful lot of cruft and poor designs in some of the POSIX APIs.
POSIX compliance is important if you value portability - especially for business critical systems (e.g. you want your bank's transaction processing data to work on IBM Z/Series's UNIX, whatever Linux distro they use, and say... SunOS). My main takeaway from the article is POSIX is too antiquated and anemic as a "system API" for modern-day use - however I'm surprised the article doesn't seem to touch upon POSIX shortc…
POSIX is neither antiquated nor anemic. There's nothing antiquated about a hierarchical filesystem with a single root. There's nothing antiquated about 'everything is a file'. In fact, that's continually useful to me on a day-to-day basis. There's nothing antiquated about byte streams, which is all they are. They aren't text streams.
A great example of how all of this turns out to be good design is that you can see how easily UNIX-based systems adopted Unicode. Say what you like about byte streams as a universal interface, but it sure was easy to switch from ASCII to UTF-8 when your system APIs weren't all built around the idea that everything would be encoded in a particular way.
I don't think systemd is unpopular or controversial because it's a great leap forward. That's just buying into the propaganda. It's unpopular and controversial because it presents itself as a great leap forward while not being one.
>but some new OS will - and eventually that OS will supersede Linux in the way many people believe Rust will replace C++.
C++ hasn't even replaced C. Why would Rust replace C++? When has a popular, stable, architecturally-important language ever been replaced?
The sort of people that think that Rust will replace C++ are the sort of people who thought Java would replace C++, who thought C++ would replace C, who thought Windows would replace Unix and who think that another system of opaque proprietary object-oriented APIs will replace POSIX. They're wrong, in every way.
Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#7I know people tend to hold up POSIX compliance as something that's of utmost importance, but from my conversations with Bionic's maintainers, there's an awful lot of cruft and poor designs in some of the POSIX APIs.
POSIX compliance is important if you value portability - especially for business critical systems (e.g. you want your bank's transaction processing data to work on IBM Z/Series's UNIX, whatever Linux distro they use, and say... SunOS). My main takeaway from the article is POSIX is too antiquated and anemic as a "system API" for modern-day use - however I'm surprised the article doesn't seem to touch upon POSIX shortc…
Ioctl is a deranged joke. The rest has held up surprisingly well, and I regularly find myself dropping down a few layers of abstraction to get away from higher level APIs.
I can generally get more done faster with a binary pipe and some sort of generator for serialization than with higher level communication APIs.
Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
POSIX compliance is important if you value portability - especially for business critical systems (e.g. you want your bank's transaction processing data to work on IBM Z/Series's UNIX, whatever Linux distro they use, and say... SunOS). My main takeaway from the article is POSIX is too antiquated and anemic as a "system API" for modern-day use - however I'm surprised the article doesn't seem to touch upon POSIX shortc…
POSIX is neither antiquated nor anemic. There's nothing antiquated about a hierarchical filesystem with a single root. There's nothing antiquated about 'everything is a file'. In fact, that's continually useful to me on a day-to-day basis. There's nothing antiquated about byte streams, which is all they are. They aren't text streams. A great example of how all of this turns out to be good design is that you can see h…
> Java would replace C++, who thought C++ would replace C, who thought Windows would replace Unix
All of these have happened, for many use cases.
Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
POSIX is neither antiquated nor anemic. There's nothing antiquated about a hierarchical filesystem with a single root. There's nothing antiquated about 'everything is a file'. In fact, that's continually useful to me on a day-to-day basis. There's nothing antiquated about byte streams, which is all they are. They aren't text streams. A great example of how all of this turns out to be good design is that you can see h…
> Java would replace C++, who thought C++ would replace C, who thought Windows would replace Unix All of these have happened, for many use cases.
No, they haven't. Stop believing everything you read on reddit. Java didn't displace C++, and C++ certainly hasn't displaced C.
Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]
#10Sometimes I wish ACLs were better supported.