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The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

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Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

#101

Post by rocqua »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #33
rocqua wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, without a build in (good) way to do e.g. array types, every program will roll their own. That is lots of duplicate work, and makes having programs interact a manual process of integrating 2 unspecified ad-hoc standards. Programming languages create idioms and standard ways to do things. We judge those for their clarity and quality. On that front UNIXs "you get a stream if bytes, do what you want" leads to a…

Except that there are standard ways of doing arrays. Newline terminated is the most common, null-terminated is used for data that could have unusual characters in it, and most of the standard utilities support both. The problem with not doing this is that the operating system is imposing some arbitrary standard on data that may not have even come from the same system. If the data you get is JSON, there are utilities…

There are indeed standard ways, but they are _bad_, they are badly specified, but mostly they are just bad but easy ideas. Not to say that anyone who wrote a bash tool that uses newlines or nulls as sentinels is bad programmer. But to say that UNIX IPC offering nothing better than newlines or nulls as idomatic is a big downside of UNIX.

Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

#102

Post by t43562 »

cpach wrote: post #81
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #77

"an operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit inside a language; there shouldn’t be one" I've wondered the same thing about databases. Just like an OS, a database has to manage data on disk and figure out when to cache it. The files & folders metaphor is arguably a relic of pre-computer times--instead of searching through folders, it is easier to search and sort based on particular attributes, somethi…

Didn’t BeOS have some features like that?

https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/practical-file-system-d...

  The Be operating system (BeOS) uses BFS as its native file      
  system. BFS is a modern 64-bit journaled file system. BFS 
  also supports extended file attributes (name/value pairs) 
  and can index the extended attributes, which allows it to 
  offer a query interface for locating files in addition to 
  the normal name-based hierarchical interface. The 
  attribute, indexing, and query features of BFS set it apart 
  from other file systems and make it an interesting example 
  to discuss.
So yes it has been done. Personally I like the AS400 idea most - an object store where you don't even have to really "think" about the difference between memory and storage - you just have objects that you can cause to "persist" when you "commit" them and anything they are linked to by pointers will also be persisted.

Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

#104

Post by smaudet »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #73
jcelerier wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that Qt is more bloated than Cocoa I don't know what to say. That objc runtime is so heavy and slow, good luck making it run on microcontrollers

I don't understand the technical reasons behind it, but for whatever reason doing something like resizing a Window for any non-trivial GUI seems to cause the repaints to drop down to 15-20Hz in Qt and spike the CPU usage massively. The same issue doesn't occur with Win32 or Cocoa.

You probably don't have graphics drivers installed...

IIRC the fancier toolkits (Qt, GTK) do widget accell with either mandatory blitting and/or 3d (OpenGL/DirectX) (Other frameworks like WPF and Cocoa are notorious for this too).

There are, or used to be, frameworks that were not gpu dependent.

I've never hear nor seen these massive drops you claim to, so either you are running 20 year old hardware or your graphics aren't on, or you have some other hardware issue...

Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

#105

Post by pjmlp »

dgb23 wrote: post #100
pjmlp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle does that, https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2... Then use APEX for Web applications, that make use of stored procedures, https://apex.oracle.com/en/ Other enterprise RDMS have similar offerings.

getting a 404 on the first link

Cannot edit it anylonger,

"Automatic Storage Management"

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...

Allows mapping volumes to be directly managed by the database.

Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

#107

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

pjmlp wrote: post #36
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that "classical UNIX desktop" doesn't exist. (Hell, even UNIX itself doesn't exist anymore. Linux and FreeBSD is its own thing now.)

It sure does exist, a large majority of Linux and FreeBSD users pretend they are still living in the 80's with vt100 and an improved twm. As proven by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437173 making to the first page today.

Imagine the BLING if you combined that with this:

[X] http://jdebp.info/Softwares/nosh/user-vt-screenshots.html

Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

#108

Post by mikewarot »

If you have one job to do, and it doesn't involve other computers, you don't need an OS. MS-DOS or equivalent program loader/file system API will work just fine. Windows, MacOS, and Linux work fine in a stand alone environment (unless an APT {advanced persistent threat, like the NSA} is after you)

On the other hand, if you're even thinking about touching the internet, or any other computer, you need to have every single task limited ahead of time to a specified set of resources, like mainframes do. Doing anything less is foolish, and I certainly wouldn't build a civilization on such folly.

Yes, in an era of mobile code, persistent internet, you need an operating system that doesn't give any default permissions to any executing task, ever. It must also safely and securely multiplex access to the hardware resources, all of the hardware resources, in all of the subsystems in the SoC, etc.

There are no Operating Systems, as of yet. I weep for the future.

Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

#109

Post by slx26 »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #77

"an operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit inside a language; there shouldn’t be one" I've wondered the same thing about databases. Just like an OS, a database has to manage data on disk and figure out when to cache it. The files & folders metaphor is arguably a relic of pre-computer times--instead of searching through folders, it is easier to search and sort based on particular attributes, somethi…

This is basically the problem of organizing knowledge and setting up rules to easily interface with it through computational systems. There was an interesting article that discussed the topic some time ago, but can't find it right now.

Neither hierarchical organization nor tags nor databases work. You need a mix of everything, and you need to make it nice enough for the user to be able to select the best option at the right time. Think about how you think and access memories. There are a ton of ways you do it, not only hierarchically or "table-based".

This could also be likened to the problem of categorization that meta-rationalists like to talk about so much. Basically, that (at least in human terms) no categorization works under all possible contexts.

We are not gods, so it should be obvious that there's no possible organization of knowledge that makes it all perfectly available. It can't be frictionless, instantaneous and complete at the same time. Then, it should be obvious that if we want to make access to information as effective as possible, multiple methods need to be combined.

In fact, a lot of the technology that has been most "revolutionary", has been technology that improved the way we access certain types of information. Graphical interfaces, databases, spreadsheets, hyperlinks, google search, etc. We have also used calendars, lists, schedules, diagrams, button panels, etc., long before computers were a reality.

There are still a few steps left. As we attempt to tackle even more and more complex systems, we are pushed to look for new ways to manage all that.

Re: The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]

#110

Post by lloydatkinson »

mikewarot wrote: post #108

If you have one job to do, and it doesn't involve other computers, you don't need an OS. MS-DOS or equivalent program loader/file system API will work just fine. Windows, MacOS, and Linux work fine in a stand alone environment (unless an APT {advanced persistent threat, like the NSA} is after you) On the other hand, if you're even thinking about touching the internet, or any other computer, you need to have every sin…

Isn't what you just described Fuschia?
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