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Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

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Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#61

Post by __jal »

geofft wrote: post #37
jascii wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtualization: See VMS (1977) Kernel-bypass networking: See microkernels (1967) Need I go on?

I think it is a wild misunderstanding of how academic research works to say that the first demonstration of a concept is equal to all further work on a concept. It is like saying that the Human Genome Project isn't recent work because the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953.

This is very common thinking - people seem to equate the first discussion of a concept with "discovery" with "the important stuff".

If that line of thought were consistent, it would credit Babbage, or maybe Turing, as the last computer scientist to do something useful.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#62

Post by jascii »

wyldfire wrote: post #28
jascii wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what makes you say that? There is more social focus on security, however that seems more a consequence of the pervasiveness of computing in our society then in fundamental progress in our systems-thinking. As far as I can tell, the basic security models have not changed much since the late 60's.

"the basic security models have not changed much since the late 60's" != "number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security" Those two are very different claims IMO. Who cares what the basic security models are if you are significantly more difficult to attack? We can debate whether these were "innovative" or not but the fact is that in 2000 none of these things existed in anyth…

The article is talking about academic research while most of the examples you quote seem recent(ish) industry implementations of these security models. I'd say that corroborates rather then disputes the authors thesis..

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#63

Post by geofft »

yingw787 wrote: post #47
geofft wrote: post #35

"What happened" was two-fold: 1. Starting especially a few years before 2000 but continuing today, the software industry is quite profitable, pays well, and has lots of openings, while the a academic job market in systems research continues to pay poorly and has much more limited openings. So if you want to do systems software research while also having an enjoyable quality of life, you might as well go to a company…

Commercial research is decently different from academic research, which is what I think Rob may be referring to. Commercial research needs to keep in mind the existing legacy systems used by the sponsor. Innovations are more evolutionary instead of revolutionary as the field matures. They may be more tailored to observable pain points of the research sponsor. They may not be widely shared if they yield results provid…

Some specific innovations off the top of my head that are pretty firmly outside traditional academic research, and seem more revolutionary than evolutionary:

- Linux's read-copy-update synchronization mechanism. It has been described in papers, but you're better off following mailing list posts or LWN writeups.

- Rust's borrow checker and lifetime system. It's built on existing well-known ideas (e.g. affine types) and there's since been some academic work on formalizing it, but the specific system Rust uses has no direct precedent, is pretty novel, and was developed outside academia. (Note that Rust came out of Mozilla Research, which is far, far smaller than Bell Labs but also an organization that intentionally works on revolutionary and not evolutionary improvements.)

- libdill and Trio's structured concurrency, a solid theoretical framework for handling async/await-shaped problems without turning your execution into concurrent spaghetti. The techniques are not unprecedented, but https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g... is a better framing of it.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#64

Post by eli_gottlieb »

rayiner wrote: post #31
harryh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail didn't come out until 2004. You'd be stuck with Hotmail in 2000. Google Maps didn't come out until 2005. Google Docs (and the subsequent migration of MS Office to web accessible forms) didn't come until even later.

Gmail is lame compared to Outlook 2000. (It also broke self-hosted email for everyone.) Likewise Google Docs can’t hold a candle to Office 2000 (or even Word Perfect 6.1). It has extremely bare-bones control over text formatting and page layout. E.g. no kerning, limited styling, no footnote styles, limited control of header/footer formatting, no section breaks, etc. No section breaks! The version of Word Perfect I in…

>Microsoft's web apps are a grim reminder of how desktop UIs have evolved backwards. (I’m in the midst of evaluating Office 365 as part of some IT transitions at work.) It's missing tons of features even compared to Word 2000. And it's a total pig. I thought Office was a pig before, but moving it to the Web made everything 10x worse. (Google Docs is less of a pig, but that seems to be because it has less functionality than Gobe Productive on BeOS.)

Sure, that's all true, but this backwards devolution also ensures the important thing: that you don't really own the code you run, a centralized provider does, and they can change or break it as they please, without having to remain compatible with your machine. This is a business model problem: they've decided they do better off turning your general-purpose, user-programmable personal computer into a dumb terminal that uses 10x bloated-ass Javascript frameworks to make AJAX calls to their HTTP servers.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#65

Post by jascii »

wayoutthere wrote: post #34

This article predates it, but OS X (particularly after it mutated into iOS) represents probably the biggest source of systems innovation in the two decades after this article. Apple is very secretive, so their systems research often isn’t known outside the company until it’s actually going into a product. OS X was modern for its time, but where they’ve really pushed the envelope is with iOS. They can simply move fast…

I always understood that the "Systems" component of OS X was called Darwin and is an open source project and anything but secretive.. Did something change?

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#66

Post by [deleted] »

jascii wrote: post #53
feanaro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, please do demonstrate an ancient source of coverage-guided fuzzing, I would be very interested in that.

I think you could make a point that it would be a practical implementation of the "Infinite Monkey Theorem" made practical by extension of Moore's law.. I think the original author expresses disappointment in the lack of fundamental new developments in system research and he has a point. Then again the wheel hasn't changed much in recent history either..

[deleted]

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#67

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

dgellow wrote: post #59
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #6

I would argue that systems research has been incredibly relevant. First consider programming languages. Even though languages such as Java, C++, C# are all widely used, they are much different languages than they were in the early 2000’s. You can see the influences of academic research especially from the functional languages (monads) on these languages. Also, Rust is an exciting new language that is enabled by the s…

> The late 90’s and early 2000’s were a weird time where the hardware was improving so fast and taking software along for a free ride that a lot of software was good enough. Would you say that wasn’t the case during the past 20 years (2000-2019)? Or do you consider all that period to be “early 2000’s”?

I think Herb Sutter's 2005 article "The Free Lunch Is Over" was a signal that this was changing.

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#69

Post by icedchai »

wayoutthere wrote: post #34

This article predates it, but OS X (particularly after it mutated into iOS) represents probably the biggest source of systems innovation in the two decades after this article. Apple is very secretive, so their systems research often isn’t known outside the company until it’s actually going into a product. OS X was modern for its time, but where they’ve really pushed the envelope is with iOS. They can simply move fast…

OS X is NeXTStep at the core. It dates back to the 80's.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

#70

Post by sdenton4 »

__jal wrote: post #61
geofft wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a wild misunderstanding of how academic research works to say that the first demonstration of a concept is equal to all further work on a concept. It is like saying that the Human Genome Project isn't recent work because the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953.

This is very common thinking - people seem to equate the first discussion of a concept with "discovery" with "the important stuff". If that line of thought were consistent, it would credit Babbage, or maybe Turing, as the last computer scientist to do something useful.

And machine learning is still stuck in the sixties...
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