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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]

#191

Post by t43562 »

abruzzi wrote: post #149
t43562 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, inde…

Also, prior to BFS, in the earlier beta builds of BeOS, the file system was much more database like, but it ended up having performance issues (IIRC), so in a later version, they replaced it with BFS.

Apparently the earlier builds used an actual database alongside the filesystem but it was hard to keep them consistent with each other so they altered it.

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

#192

Post by kaba0 »

arnaudsm wrote: post #76

Pardon the biological analogy, but diversity has 2 main benefits : resistance to epidemics (malware) and faster evolution (innovation). I don't want to converge towards a single OS, but welcome standards and bridges between them.

Continuing on your analogy, I would argue we have less diversity due to the all-encompassing three major OSes.

Similarly to how you don’t really get competitors to eucaryotes and prokaryotes, the initial investment (device drivers) to create an OS (organism) that is actually usable is so high that one basically can’t overcome it when others are available.

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

#193

Post by AussieWog93 »

renox wrote: post #185
AussieWog93 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my own cross-platform windowing/event API from scratch at my last job, based on top of win32 on Windows, Cocoa on Mac and Qt on Linux. The only platform where there was any noticeable performance drops at all was Linux, because it relied on Qt. When I said "I don't understand the technical reasons behind it", I didn't mean "I don't understand how to abstract OS-native APIs". I meant "I don't understand how a…

I'm not it's a Qt issue: it could be a lack of hardware acceleration on Linux's GPU driver..

This is something I've observed cross-platform (Windows, macOS and Linux) across both nVidia and AMD machines with updated drivers. Actually try it.

Get your favourite Qt program, resize the window like a madman and watch your CPU usage launch into the stratosphere.

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

#194

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.

> with vt100 and an improved twm

That's in no way a "classic Unix desktop". This is hipster nostalgia, like those indie "retro" pixel art videogames.

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

#195

Post by the_only_law »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #194
pjmlp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> with vt100 and an improved twm That's in no way a "classic Unix desktop". This is hipster nostalgia, like those indie "retro" pixel art videogames.

What is a classic Unix desktop then? Workstation running CDE/Motif?

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

#196

Post by PaulHoule »

kaba0 wrote: post #183
PaulHoule wrote: post #125

IBM never had a plan for a mainframe operating system that made sense -- given the idea that the "360" was supposed to encompass the whole circle of applications. What happened was some academics figured out it was possible to make virtual machines on the 370 and that you could run a few different operating systems at the same time. If you were doing software dev on the 370, for instance, you would start up a VM runn…

We sort of have that with cloud computing, don’t we?

Yep.

Also there are many x86 and other systems where people use VMWare or something like that for "server consolidation" without going all the way out to the cloud.

The difference today though is that the guest operating system today is a "full-service" operating system such as Linux or Windows. In many of these cases the partitioning of the service could be accomplished through user id's, processes, sessions, containers, and similar facilities offered by the guest OS.

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

#197

Post by smaudet »

klodolph wrote: post #153
pjmlp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCC doesn't do modern Objective-C, only what they got from NeXT days.

> GCC doesn't do modern Objective-C, only what they got from NeXT days. It's definitely a lot more than the NeXT days. GCC got fast enumeration, exceptions, garbage collection (if you really want it), synthesized properties, etc. These are the "Objective C 2.0" features which got released in 2007, back before Apple was shipping Clang. GCC doesn't have ARC, array / dictionary literals, or other new features. But it's…

You mentioned a runtime though.

Debating whether some language feature can exist on an mcu is somewhat unrelated - the point was about code size bloat not whether you can fake one instruction set with another...

You can fake e.g. multiply with a for loop and an add instruction (1 or 2 cycles) but that will run orders of magnitude slower than a 2 or 3 clock cycle multiply instruction...

So the point about osx arch is not really addressed, if you have runtime that cannot be easily ported or osx cpu arch which produces prohibitive instruction sets it doesn't matter if gcc can target an old version of objective C, it is, as stated, not that simple.

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

#198

Post by travisjungroth »

pjmlp wrote: post #12
travisjungroth wrote: post #7

(Only read the abstract). I’m learning Emacs and it’s making me think that we missed on the correct abstraction level of the operating system. There are programs that are OS-like (Emacs, browsers, Electron, anything that takes plug-ins). Maybe operating systems could have been lower level, and we could have developed more/better options on the pseudoOS level on top. This seems somewhat inline with the Smalltalk visio…

Well, have a look at http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/interlisp_... Then follow up with "The Interlisp Programming Environment" https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1981/04/01667317/1... "Graphical Programming in Interlisp-D" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlN0hHLZL8c "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 Cedar was the very first graphical workstation for so…

Thanks!

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

#199

Post by klodolph »

pjmlp wrote: post #188
klodolph wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GCC doesn't do modern Objective-C, only what they got from NeXT days. It's definitely a lot more than the NeXT days. GCC got fast enumeration, exceptions, garbage collection (if you really want it), synthesized properties, etc. These are the "Objective C 2.0" features which got released in 2007, back before Apple was shipping Clang. GCC doesn't have ARC, array / dictionary literals, or other new features. But it's…

Sugar or not, doesn't change the fact that it won't compile modern Objective-C code.

Then use Clang, or port the code.

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

#200

Post by smaudet »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #193
renox wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not it's a Qt issue: it could be a lack of hardware acceleration on Linux's GPU driver..

This is something I've observed cross-platform (Windows, macOS and Linux) across both nVidia and AMD machines with updated drivers. Actually try it. Get your favourite Qt program, resize the window like a madman and watch your CPU usage launch into the stratosphere.

There are some reports of bad things happening with inefficient QPainter usage, and some bugs related to text drawing especially after qt5, after a cursory look...would be better to provide specific examples. I do rather suspect something machine or even program specific, though.
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