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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]

#71

Post by hnlmorg »

ModernMech wrote: post #6
p2t2p wrote: post #5

On one had - yes please, screw OSes, gimme something like Smalltalk environment (in it's Pharo incarnation preferably). On other hand - define OS. Isn't that Smalltalk environment an OS if it runs bare metal?

Yes, there is a very blurry line between operating systems, programming languages, and we can include databases as well. Some operating systems as you point out are PLs. Some PLs are implemented as databases. They’re all just really complex accounting systems by nature. Look at the implementation of a lot of OSes, PLs and DBs they are really just made up of tables keeping track of relationships all the way down.

> Some operating systems as you point out are PLs

None that immediately spring to my mind. There are operating systems that incorporate programming languages as their default user interface (like UNIX that drops into a Borne shell and LISP machines) and there are computers that have programming languages baked into their firmware (like the 70s and 80s micro computers did with BASIC). But in neither instance is the language itself the operating system.

The micro computer instance is definitely nuanced though. Some do argue that Microsoft BASIC et al were an operating system. Some don't. I'm in the latter category because I think "BIOS" more closely describes the function of the software on those old micro computers.

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

#72

Post by gpderetta »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #59
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning ; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." - Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory…

Nothing is inherently a stream of bytes. If all you have is a stream of bytes without a context, you have absolutely no idea what it's supposed to be and no clue how to do anything useful with it. The whole point of OP is that it should be easy - or at least possible - to access contextual meta-information. Because this makes it easier to to build tools that work with meaning automatically instead of relying on unrel…

You can certainly have a decent idea of what information is there by just looking at the bytes and reverse engineer the protocol. This is how unix pipelines are composed as a matter of fact.

Now, of course it would it be better if each program formally described the schema of its output and the system provided tooling to act on this information, but being able to string together uncooperative programs via their common denominator (i.e stream of bytes), is powerful and the unix way.

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

#73

Post by AussieWog93 »

jcelerier wrote: post #48
AussieWog93 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically for Linux, there is no ubiquitous standard with decent performance and a predictable look such as win32 or Cocoa. Instead, developers rely on toolkits such as Qt or GTK to ensure compatibility, which are usually either bloated or ugly.

If you think that Qt is more bloated than Cocoa I don't know what to say. That objc runtime is so heavy and slow, good luck making it run on microcontrollers

I don't understand the technical reasons behind it, but for whatever reason doing something like resizing a Window for any non-trivial GUI seems to cause the repaints to drop down to 15-20Hz in Qt and spike the CPU usage massively. The same issue doesn't occur with Win32 or Cocoa.

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

#74

Post by lavabiopsy »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #63
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear ImGui does not support Arabic (right-to-left, glyph shaping) and will not support Arabic ( https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1343 ). I don't think it supports accessibility either. As much as I struggle with Qt's APIs (aging janky Widgets, half-baked QML on the desktop, the item models are an impenetrable byzantine enterprisey API that's simultaneously too open-ended, not flexible enough since it imposes i…

>Dear ImGui does not support Arabic (right-to-left, glyph shaping) and will not support Arabic ( https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1343 ). Vanilla ImGui doesn't, but I both wrapped my head around and then rewrote the text renderer in all of 2 days as a junior dev. This version could support arbitrarily many UTF-8 codepoints with kerning and all and had a negligible performance hit on the machines I tested on. I…

Maybe you want to help this person who is trying to integrate harfbuzz: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/4227

The other major thing missing in relation to that is input method support.

The problem with those type of APIs and accessibility is that implementing screen reader support basically means making it retained mode in some capacity, because accessibility APIs expect you to export a tree of objects and push state updates.

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

#77

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

"an operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit inside a language; there shouldn’t be one"

I've wondered the same thing about databases. Just like an OS, a database has to manage data on disk and figure out when to cache it. The files & folders metaphor is arguably a relic of pre-computer times--instead of searching through folders, it is easier to search and sort based on particular attributes, something that databases are well-suited to. I think it'd be interesting to start with a database and try to build an OS around it, see how far you could go.

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

#78

Post by pjmlp »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #46
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.

How do you find time for work? I see your comments shitting on everything that's not Windows pretty much everywhere.

https://xkcd.com/303/

You missed my praises for Apple and Google platforms.

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

#79

Post by wsc981 »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #77

"an operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit inside a language; there shouldn’t be one" I've wondered the same thing about databases. Just like an OS, a database has to manage data on disk and figure out when to cache it. The files & folders metaphor is arguably a relic of pre-computer times--instead of searching through folders, it is easier to search and sort based on particular attributes, somethi…

But humans generally like to organise things hierarchically and I would think database are not well suited for this purpose.

That is, unless there exists some kind of tree structured database that I don't know about ...

Many years ago Microsoft tried to implement some kind of database oriented file system (it was a big dream of Bill Gates IIRC and probably meant for Longhorn), but this project never became part of an official Windows release AFAIK. It'd be interesting to know why Microsoft abandoned this initiative.

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

#80

Post by bsdubernerd »

overgard wrote: post #9

I can't help but think about what happened with graphics APIs - the older ones (DX9, OpenGL) held your hand more, and the new ones are super bare metal and not written for the faint of heart. I think most would agree this is better though; for an application developer you can simply use a much higher level library built on top, and for the library/engine developer you have a lot more power and control. The old APIs w…

The OS is all about resource sharing and allow a minimum common level of interoperability.

Smalltalk can provide a storage abstraction, but to interoperate with other things it needs to be able to save data in a way that can be loaded back into your Java program.

OSes can provide you with the desired abstraction level.

You could stop at the block layer, which many DBs can take advantage of, but that won't help your Java and Smalltalk program work together easily. A filesystem is a common abstraction which should provided by someone.

Your example about the graphics stack is no different, the problem is that various components of the system are not "shared" in the same way all the time. The actual low-level abstraction of the GPU being provided to you by the kernel has more complexity today than what it had years ago in order to allow virtualization and compartmentalization of graphics memory. This wasn't needed some years ago, as it was assumed X11 was the only program to ever going to access the framebuffer, and would allow any single program using GL to trash the entire GPU.

What has been simplified is the user-level facing code, so that you can more precisely control allocation of the resources. Akin to the page-level memory allocation support we always had. This was done to allow /some/ programs (3d engines) to push the hardware to the limits (I'm relatively sad the GL1.x is "deprecated" - I still consider it to be an excellent API for prototyping and what would be 90%+ of applications).

Consider audio instead. OSS always provided pretty much all the hardware features, but allow no resource sharing. Every single evolution on that front has been an increase in complexity to allow for resource sharing. And it's interesting because the effort went in and out of the kernel a couple of times. Describing the evolution of OSS/ALSA in linux/freebsd would be too long, however we now have very fat daemons sitting in front of the HW just for resource sharing.

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