31–40 of 73 posts
Slides: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/2021-07-16-OSDIKeyNo...
He seems to think the solution is that "the OS" should expand in scope to also run and manage all the myriad little special purpose processors on a modern SoC.
It takes a person like this to design a language like Go, whose fundamental philosophy is that people cannot and do not want to learn anything new, ever. It takes that kind of cynicism to also view hardware with disdain and horror.
I think that i understand the argument, but things changed with the advent of microservices. Suddenly everything turned into a distributed system, and it is hard to cope without some understanding of the subject matter. This lecture series by Martin Kleppman has helped me quite a bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAMfLPZZhE&list=PLeKd45zvjc... Also see his book 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', which…
> but things changed with the advent of microservices. Microservices is just a marketing buzzword invented by container orchestration start-ups. Partitioning of large applications across multiple inter-connected processes has been around for decades. Your computer is packed with microservices. On Linux, type `watch date` and enjoy two microservices running and interacting. On Windows, observe a dozen of svchost.exe p…
We got some of the distributed aspects, when we got multiple processor cores and multiple cpus, but it's still not exactly the same thing.
It takes a person like this to design a language like Go, whose fundamental philosophy is that people cannot and do not want to learn anything new, ever. It takes that kind of cynicism to also view hardware with disdain and horror.
See also Timothy Roscoe's USENIX OSDI 2021 keynote where he laments the same thing: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke... Slides: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/2021-07-16-OSDIKeyNo... He seems to think the solution is that "the OS" should expand in scope to also run and manage all the myriad little special purpose processors on a modern SoC.
It takes a person like this to design a language like Go, whose fundamental philosophy is that people cannot and do not want to learn anything new, ever. It takes that kind of cynicism to also view hardware with disdain and horror.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the quagmires with systems research is that it makes “stuff” (performance or usability) easier for the user. Research is supposed to be “scientific”, so you need ample evidence of those claims. This is difficult to obtain for very weird systems because usability is in human-computer interaction, which is hard to measure. If it’s so weird to not be portable and you have not measured humans, it must be impractic…
Systems research has become like orthodox economics, doing various marginal empirics but missing the bigger more qualative macro picture. Maybe the megacorp that is going to hire you wants to see some benchmarks improved, but frankly, that's not what the world needs, or even what would best benefit the megacorp? Economics at least has its uncooth grandfather in Political Economy. Computer systems needs to discover it…
Do you know of anything published that tackles this?
Maybe this paper was accurate in 2000, but does not capture the work of systems research since then. Some examples: - DHT protocols as used in bittorrent - SMR protocols, used in all kinds of distributed systems, from blockchains to cloud computing systems - Cloud computing systems, such as Spark, Mesos, MapReduce This doesn't even cover work on networks, databases, systems, security, etc.
That is all cool, but the issue here is, "the de facto standard technology stack is ossifying upward", as nicely put in http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/ I think person is now, in fact, getting paid to redo the firmware as desired, but while commonplace firmware might be uniquely disgusting, the bigger monoliths with even less competition are still the operating systems. Something still needs to be don…
I also think PL innovations are going to usher in a new revolution at the bottom of the stack, just by making systems programming more accessible. I mean, Rust has already made inroads into existing OSes, and the increased accessibility will inevitably lead to more exciting experiments soon.
Hmm, doesn't Rob Pike now work at Google, which has developed the Chrome browser, which in addition to being a successor to Netscape (mentioned in the article) is basically a complete OS and runtime environment, as well as the literal ChromeOS, Android, Fuchsia, and Kubernetes, as well as Dart, and Go (and also adopted Kotlin for Android?) Not to mention software systems for special-purpose hardware like tensorflow,…
You are exactly correct, and that’s his only (highly belaboured) point - none of those exciting things are coming out of academia, it’s all commercial labs.
But also things like DHTs, blockchains improvements, cloud software like Spark, Mesos, etc. came from academia
I think that i understand the argument, but things changed with the advent of microservices. Suddenly everything turned into a distributed system, and it is hard to cope without some understanding of the subject matter. This lecture series by Martin Kleppman has helped me quite a bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAMfLPZZhE&list=PLeKd45zvjc... Also see his book 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', which…