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Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#32I had lunch with Rob Pike after he gave that talk. I wasted it on arguing about Java, being just a dumb grad student at the time.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#33The author defines systems research as:
> What is Systems Research these days? Web caches, web servers, file systems, network packet delays, all that stuff. Performance, peripherals, and applications, but not kernels or even user-level applications.
This seems false. DBMS and OS research is pretty interesting today. Look into Andy Pavlo or Onur Mutlu's courses and students to get pointers.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
While true we are hardware bound, it’s pretty apparently we are not fully utilizing the hardware all the time. That gap is what research needs to close
I would say closing that gap is exactly what engineering is - optimizing your existing systems to maximally use the hardware. Its very quantitative and extremely detail oriented; you usually just improve Linux or add system calls for better performance, instead of baking up a whole new operating system. Obviously part of this is just arguing over semantics though :)
That is very useful work to squeeze more performance out of existing software, I would say there is still a lot more to be gained from big wins in more efficiently distributing computing power like cloud computing and containerization (which are the kind of non-obvious ideas that require systems research to happen before implementation).
I'm not a systems researcher on the verge of becoming a millionaire so I don't know what those ideas are but anyone can see the untapped potential is enormous.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
>A developer from 02000 transported forward to now would be totally lost in those 15 out of 19. Don't you mean "015 out of 019"?
But 9 is not a valid octal digit since ANSI C.
"02000" is a "long now" thing, not octal. Thinking about the next 10,000 years and ald that.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#36In the 2000s we spoke about distributed operating systems (Inferno, etc.). That's where systems research seemed to be headed, yet that never really took off. But maybe we're revisiting the concept now, just coming down from the layer above (e.g. application data types) instead of trying to rethink the OS. I work on this [1], it kinda looks like systems software, and it doesn't feel stagnant. But then, nobody uses it…
The Web is our distributed operating system. You say the name of an application, and the latest version of its code gets loaded into your computer over an encrypted and authenticated connection, compiled for your platform, and run in a sandbox that isolates it from all the other applications you're running. You can use any device interchangeably to run it, and all your data is just there. It's not a very good distrib…
> we've definitely realized the mobile code and portable executable dreams of the 90s
Fine, now how to get rid of it, along with the lack of innovation and the entangled group or naive nerds and salesmen taking advantage of them who think or pretend the web is about their fscking apps when it was always about content.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
But 9 is not a valid octal digit since ANSI C.
"02000" is a "long now" thing, not octal. Thinking about the next 10,000 years and ald that. https://longnow.org/
It's just another unnecessary byte to transfer; or more, in fact, due to the inevitable wtfs and octal comments.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#38I think that the intervening 22 years have proved this correct. Just like aeronautics and materials science, computer science seems to have stagnated.
The fish rots from the top. Lobbyists in the policy sausage making machine are likely the blame for the stagnation. The iPhone's introduction brought back to life the results of past research in industry. For example, Gorilla glass. And, compare the rocket engine design of SpaceX's Raptor, BO's and the designed to be reusable but to be thrown away after single use SLS's.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Web is our distributed operating system. You say the name of an application, and the latest version of its code gets loaded into your computer over an encrypted and authenticated connection, compiled for your platform, and run in a sandbox that isolates it from all the other applications you're running. You can use any device interchangeably to run it, and all your data is just there. It's not a very good distrib…
> we've definitely realized the mobile code and portable executable dreams of the 90s Fine, now how to get rid of it, along with the lack of innovation and the entangled group or naive nerds and salesmen taking advantage of them who think or pretend the web is about their fscking apps when it was always about content.
Build a better alternative and pack them off to it?
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#40I think that the intervening 22 years have proved this correct. Just like aeronautics and materials science, computer science seems to have stagnated.
Neither aeronautics nor material science have stagnated. I doubt computer science has either.