To me, the author is basically asking for OpenVMS with the RMS and RDB file types.
A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
111–120 of 188 posts
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#112Oh, it's the every OS sucks story again. It's all about the user experience. System should be friend and still enable the user to increasingly get more out of the computer. It also needs to be extremely responsive. AmigaOS got a lot right back in the 80s. BeOS (and now Haiku as spiritual successor) took a lot from that (system kits vs amiga's default set of shared libraries, and the concept of datatypes) and added so…
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Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#113Can we get (1997) added on this? (revision date)
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being an RTOS is only necessary if your application has a requirement for real-time response and is also itself designd for bounded-response-time. Ignoring drivers for the moment, your typical desktop application does not have a need for a bounded response time. Desktop applications typically do not fail due to a dialog box being popped up a few milliseconds late. The underlying drivers, on the other hand, do tend to…
> Desktop applications typically do not fail due to a dialog box being popped up a few milliseconds late. Not a few milliseconds, but a few dozen seconds might be a different story. While it might be hard to predict or measure an exact number, your deadline is however long it takes for the user to equate it to "forever" and kill the process / leave the website / uninstall the app / etc..
A 'real time' OS does not mean fast. It is simply that the OS can promise an application/driver that it will get the processing time that it requests. e.g. a nuclear power station controller might use a RTOS to guarantee that the emergency shutdown process can be completed in under a certain number of seconds, regardless of whatever else is going on.
In general, being able to make these kind of promises means that the OS has to be pretty conservative about the code it allows to run, and a 'best effort' OS or some 'soft' RTOS is probably going to be faster or more efficient.
In terms of UI responsiveness, I'd bet that crappy software running on a 'hard' RTOS can still manage to feel sluggish, because the UI delays probably aren't actually in the OS itself.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#115My dream is for a computer OS that has all the good new stuff (CPU/GPU acceleration mainly, OS level HW support) and none of the bad new stuff (bloated UI/my every mouse click being transmitted to the cloud, web app infestation).
I don't care how it's built, as long as we have above.
Bring back the Windows XP GUI (with GPU accelerated window theming and a few select other things) and I will be a happy bunny.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#116When someone initially looks at all the bespoke interfaces on an OS that could easily be provided by a single API, one’s first and natural response is to wonder whether all this complexity has a non-historical justification for it. On Linux/BSD, I would argue that these choices are mostly historical and do not originate from some theoretical model of how an OS should be structured. But let’s say we sit down and write…
Yeah, I think an api of that sort would quickly turn into a headache if it subtlety did code dispatch through a common interface on objects that are hardly related in reality. From a programming perspective, that kind of opaqueness is more of a mental burden than relief.
I can see a database interface being useful if you constrained the scope of what an entry is and don't allow those operations to actually modify the objects.
The extent of the scope could start at what are traditionally considered OS resources, not random blocks of texts, newsgroups, or pixels, but things that would generally be more useful to query.
Not being allowed to actually modify an entry through 'delete' presents a problem. The database and the code that is allowed to modify its state would have to be synchronized/notified on an update.
In this way, the database is a front-end to the OS.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#117Just a general question: Do you think there is a market for a new operating system? The cost of building something better or equal to mainstream systems seem too high to even consider challenging the status quo.
Well, there is always a market for a new OS as they all are so complex and have so many baked in assumptions, that they cannot possibly do well on the variety of use cases that people need computing for.
Can you elaborate? What kind of use case are you considering?
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#118Why not to trade a multitude of "custom" database managers for a single well-designed distributed database manager? It's not clear whether the author is arguing that all existing OS data structures should be replaced with a single database system, or if they simply want all OS data to be capable of being queried/updated via a standard database style interface. The former is simply hubris ("I know the perfect data str…
That's the beauty of the relational model, it doesn't specify data structures. Those can be added later by indexes. For more info check https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2364452_Data_Struct...
This is the key. You can even say that we only have a small amount of abstract "shapes" of data:
Scalars, list, tables(relations), tree/graph.
You can build generalized operations on them and it will work even if the internal structure (ie: list can be done on top of vectors or linked list or tables or tree) differ.
This is what I working on in my own little language (http://tablam.org). Certainly requiere specialize per structure and some stuff is hard to generalize but the idea hold.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#119All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS.
Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of hardware, application, and game support in Linux, and MacOS "requiring" Apple hardware (I know about hackintoshes, built some in my day, but they always felt like a house of cards).
There are plenty of other strengths and weaknesses to each of them, I just feel as if I'm always giving up something awesome and gaining something painful when switching. One would think by now we would have more competitors (and I consider the various distributions/desktop environments of Linux as a single competitor to Windows and MacOS), trying out new ways of user experiences, and/or trying to bring together what makes each of them great into a single source. Of course, so much is driven on ROI and developer buy-in, so I understand the reality and complexity.
The above is my dream :)
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#120For user/app data at least, this sounds a lot like Fuchsia's Ledger: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/peridot/+/master/docs/ledge...