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Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

cs.columbia.edu

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Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#51

Post by discreteevent »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #4
ndesaulniers wrote: post #2

I know people tend to hold up POSIX compliance as something that's of utmost importance, but from my conversations with Bionic's maintainers, there's an awful lot of cruft and poor designs in some of the POSIX APIs.

POSIX compliance is important if you value portability - especially for business critical systems (e.g. you want your bank's transaction processing data to work on IBM Z/Series's UNIX, whatever Linux distro they use, and say... SunOS). My main takeaway from the article is POSIX is too antiquated and anemic as a "system API" for modern-day use - however I'm surprised the article doesn't seem to touch upon POSIX shortc…

" the vaporware "object-oriented operating system" concepts”

COM is Windows and COM is about as purely object oriented as you can get. It's not vaporware.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#52

Post by notalaser »

gaius wrote: post #41
milesrout wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

POSIX is neither antiquated nor anemic. There's nothing antiquated about a hierarchical filesystem with a single root. There's nothing antiquated about 'everything is a file'. In fact, that's continually useful to me on a day-to-day basis. There's nothing antiquated about byte streams, which is all they are. They aren't text streams. A great example of how all of this turns out to be good design is that you can see h…

who thought Windows would replace Unix Windows now runs all the workloads that Sun, SGI, DEC, HP, IBM yadda yadda workstations once ran. I don't remember the last time I saw a real Unix workstation outside my home office where I keep an Octane for nostalgia's sake, and the wife has her old SPARCstation. But you are right about C and POSIX.

Let me paint this in a more interesting colour: at $work, most of our development work is very POSIX-y software (it only runs on Linux, but historically, at least portions of it used to run on a bunch of BSDs, too, and they probably still do, but no one tried it in years). Almost no one in the office uses Unix on their computer, not even those of us who use Linux at home.

Most of us have Windows stations. We can install anything on them, but most of us didn't bother. They're glorified remote terminals anyway (the code is compiled and edited on a bunch of build servers). The servers do run Linux, but if we were to start from scratch now, we could probably pull off a decent build system under Windows as well. I'm using Emacs and relying on a bunch of Unix tools, either directly (grep) or indirectly (cscope through xcscope), but my colleagues who use Eclipse wouldn't feel much of a difference if the servers ran Windows.

I used to run Linux at my previous $workplace, but I definitely lost more time than my employer would be comfortable knowing disentangling things that regularly broke after updates (mostly Gnome- and systemd-related, really, but thanks to xdg's lovely practices, using a Linux system without something that can perform the black magic associated with sessions, seats, file associations and whatnot is very unpleasant).

My Windows laptop hasn't crashed once, the applications I need haven't broken once, and I haven't had to do the restart your computer to install this driver dance at all, I literally started it and hacked away. Plus, doing systems programming on a Windows system isn't all that bad, thanks to Dave Cutler and his colleagues being brilliant engineers.

I'm torn about using Windows at home, largely because I now have fifteen years' worth of BSD and Linux-managed files and countless convenience scripts to migrate, because I don't really trust Microsoft and because I think fighting my OS so that it will stop giving me ads and sending my stuff to Redmond is about as productive as wrestling with a modern Linux systems' innuvashon. But, much unlike 15 years ago, I probably could.

> my home office where I keep an Octane for nostalgia's sake, and the wife has her old SPARCstation.

I wish I had neighbours like you :-(

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#53

Post by pjmlp »

stock_toaster wrote: post #50
pjmlp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the C++ killer applications on iOS and Android, besides game engines, written 100% in C++? Where is C++ on the iOS and Android documentation versus Objective-C, Swift and Java?

Clang, LLVM, WebKit, Chrome/Blink?

Have you bothered to learn my comment?

> C++ has become an infrastructure language on the enterprise.

None of those examples, except for clang, are a full stack application written 100% in C++.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#54

Post by pjmlp »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #13
paxcoder wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should have innovated or they should have complied. Instead they built on POSIX's shoulders and then diverged only enough to harm portability. Not cool.

> then diverged only enough to harm portability How so?

ChromeOS might be built on top of a POSIX like kernel, but the actual application stack is the browser.

Android is mostly Java, the NDK only white lists a restricted set of libraries that aren't POSIX related, Android 7 dynamic linker will kill any app that tries to link to device libraries not part of that list, the Linux fork lacks APIs like e.g. UNIX IPC.

Android Things is even tighter. Only user space drivers are allowed, with C support just added this week. Before only Java drivers were allowed.

Magenta/Fuchsia is a micro-kernel with Dart as main application stack.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#55

Post by dualogy »

pjmlp wrote: post #49
astrobe_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CLI and GUI have different grammars and capabilities. If you think that CLI means "prehistory" and GUI means "future", then ask yourself why CLI has "survived" GUI for at least 30 years.

Has it? Sure it is down there on the OS tooling, but how many people outside UNIX devs, do actually bother using it? Personally it doesn't offer me any benefit over an higher level programming language REPL.

Silly flamefest this. Even back when I worked mostly for Windows/MS shops or clients, writing CLI tooling for business (not developer) needs were often the order of the day. Batch import/export tools and what not. Also prototypes of daemon-like Windows Services for client testing. All kinds of tools that weren't directly developer tools. Sure enough, we were interfacing with IT folks at the client end but still, no programmers per se!

There's a reason GUI starts with a G. Other than "graphical" user interfaces, "other" user interfaces will also always have their place..

In some ways looking at how much non-developer computer usage in the past decades has been in front of excel/access sheets and tables, these aren't so "graphical" either. They essentially end up evolving into (haphazard) custom CLI-like keyboard-driven power tools, half-programmable, half requiring intimate familiarity with its "commands" (formulas) or even "training" to use them fluidly.

But if you'd rather code out your CLI needs in a PL REPL (aka CLI), more power to you ;D

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#56

Post by hornetblack »

moby_click wrote: post #25
milesrout wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

POSIX is neither antiquated nor anemic. There's nothing antiquated about a hierarchical filesystem with a single root. There's nothing antiquated about 'everything is a file'. In fact, that's continually useful to me on a day-to-day basis. There's nothing antiquated about byte streams, which is all they are. They aren't text streams. A great example of how all of this turns out to be good design is that you can see h…

> There's nothing antiquated about a hierarchical filesystem with a single root. Unfortunately the hierarchical structure is lost in the name. It's one flat string and '/' and NUL have special meaning. In a way, containers show that there is a legitimate need for multiple roots.

It might be worth noting that the original unix designers introduced containers to unix (as "Namespaces") in Plan9.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#57

Post by tmalsburg2 »

kccqzy wrote: post #32
cperciva wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You (and the authors of the article) seem to be assuming that "modern applications" are by definition applications with graphical user interfaces.

That's what majority of computer users (smartphones included) use though. As for developer-oriented CLI tools, I've also seen more and more GNU-isms and macOS-isms creeping in.

Counter example: Almost everyone uses the Apache webserver when they browse the web, but hardly anyone even knows what that is. We could easily compile a long list of similar crucial infrastructure software that virtually everyone is using and that doesn't have graphical user interfaces.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#58

Post by fortytw2 »

POSIX has been outdated since the day it was released. Talk about binding OS development to the absolute lowest common denominator, (requiring the presence of a fortran compiler - http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ - really?) and every additional release simply adds more bloat.

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#59

Post by Gravityloss »

pjmlp wrote: post #49
astrobe_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CLI and GUI have different grammars and capabilities. If you think that CLI means "prehistory" and GUI means "future", then ask yourself why CLI has "survived" GUI for at least 30 years.

Has it? Sure it is down there on the OS tooling, but how many people outside UNIX devs, do actually bother using it? Personally it doesn't offer me any benefit over an higher level programming language REPL.

Interesting, I assume you do development? How do you handle scripting, moving files, grepping logs etc?

Re: Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

#60

Post by ycmbntrthrwaway »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #57
kccqzy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what majority of computer users (smartphones included) use though. As for developer-oriented CLI tools, I've also seen more and more GNU-isms and macOS-isms creeping in.

Counter example: Almost everyone uses the Apache webserver when they browse the web, but hardly anyone even knows what that is. We could easily compile a long list of similar crucial infrastructure software that virtually everyone is using and that doesn't have graphical user interfaces.

Count sendmail in:

> There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny.

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