81–90 of 208 posts
"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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, Android, macOS and Windows are doing just fine, it is the classical UNIX desktop that cannot get their act together. The existing issues aren't technical, rather political, like the WinRT crusade that ended up bombing and now we have plenty of GUI toolkits to chose from on Windows. Swift, Java, Kotlin and the .NET languages are more than high level enough.
MS .NET burned me hard with WPF. After finally looking into it, it more or less was cancelled for greener pastures. I don't think the newer Windows UI-Frameworks are loved that much and UWP is not really convincing for desktop applications. Just too much hassle for too little gain and the threat of vendor lock-in.
But yeah, having ramped down the team while beting the farm into WinRT wasn't the best idea.
Still, just like VB 6 in Windows 10, WPF will be around for decades to come and it isn't like there are revolutionary UI concepts to implement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's just a personal experience thing? I came across both ways of thinking as a junior dev, so to me retained mode was just a footgun rich environment. I could imagine if you had decades of experience using retained-mode, though, then you'd find that way of thinking more natural.
This affects all GUIs, if you have a lot of elements then you have to be careful not to propagate complex updates through the whole tree because it kills your performance. There are various tools to deal with this, one of them is making it retained mode, but I would say basically all of those tools come with more footguns in that the GUI can easily end up in an inconsistent state. That's what you trade for performanc…
Game UIs are (from what I understand) written almost exclusively ImGui-style, with every single widget being fed updated state data every single frame as part of the game loop.
Yet, for whatever reason, even crazy-complex UIs like SupCom's seem to have no issue rendering in realtime with an entire 3D game running in the background, while simply resizing the window I'm typing into right now (a single textedit on a static HTML page) creates visible lag and chews up full CPU on a 2015 Macbook.
That's not to say retained-mode GUIs can't be performant (embedded systems rely on retained-mode to have reasonable performance), but on a modern system it seems like the loss in performance caused by inefficiently synchronising state in retained-mode GUIs is several orders of magnitude higher than the losses caused by pushing a couple of hundred textures every frame in an ImGui context.
"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…
https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...
Then use APEX for Web applications, that make use of stored procedures,
Other enterprise RDMS have similar offerings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would be soooo happy if OSes were just absorbed by databases. The file system is just a heirarchal key value store: genius! Let's make it untyped so you have to parse everything manually just to interpret it: not so great. Yes I'm saying the Unix file system is a worse mongodb. Please at least give me a postgres or something.
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 ). 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 pus…
Looks like theirs is far more advanced than mine (mine would just generate a texture per string and cache it, the main problem it solved was being able to display non-ASCII filenames). I don't think there's much I could contribute to them at all.
>accessibility APIs expect you to export a tree of objects and push state updates
Is this an inherent limitation with the tech itself, or just an arbitrary API limitation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 commo…
"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…
There were technical issues. They simply never managed to get the system performant enough to be use as a FS replacement. There also were tons of issues with the concept itself, like proper tooling for visualising the stored objects to the user and a compatibility layer for legacy software.
It seems as if parts of it was merged into MS SQL server products [0].
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would be soooo happy if OSes were just absorbed by databases. The file system is just a heirarchal key value store: genius! Let's make it untyped so you have to parse everything manually just to interpret it: not so great. Yes I'm saying the Unix file system is a worse mongodb. Please at least give me a postgres or something.
Isn't that exactly how traditional FS work anyway? Even using MIME types only gives you an optional, non-binding hint. In the end you need to parse and interpret the content "manually" (well, usually using libraries).
I would love more collaboration between operating systems. There should be more layers with standard interfaces. For example BIOS used to be a driver layer back in the day, providing simple API to underlying OS. This concept should be expanded. I don't see no reason for every OS to rewrite those drivers again and again. There should be some standard for common device APIs, like disks, keyboards, mouses, GPU and so on…
Then, we'd have reference implementations for every single one of those, that would give examples of how to access this standardized functionality, possibly with abstractions over those. So on one end you'd have something like a wi-fi-networking-huawei library and on the other you'd have wi-fi-networking-generic library that could interface with the former and access its common functionality. Of course, as for how this could be written, and what the situation would be in regards to the C standard library or any other primitives for other sufficiently low level languages, i have no idea.
Then, you'd have a kernel module or a microkernel, that would contain the code to interface with the hardware and add all of the controls and permission management functionality, as other bits to integrate this solution with the OS. If one would go with the GNU Hurd approach, then integrating that within OS distros would suddenly get even more simple, except that Hurd seemed to fail at the actual implementation stage.
And finally, you'd have the OSes, which could implement code to interface with these modules, microkernels or add any number of necessary shims inbetween to get everything working together and provide the higher level OS functionality that's needed to use these devices within the OS context.
Of course, i'm probably oversimplifying some things, skipping a few steps here and there, but i'd chalk that up to the current approaches to using hardware in software being overcomplicated beyond need or belief, rather than me mostly being a business software developer, as opposed to systems software developer or hardware engineer. In short, there are abstractions in place already, i'm just not sure those are the right ones, but rather what was historically needed to get things working. So where's the big rewrite and learning from our past mistakes?
To me, it just feels like what we need is a set of meaningful abstractions and standardization, and not just in regards to making sure that there are security mechanisms in place for booting so the devices on which Windows runs can be limited to create more e-waste (snark) and motivate consumerism, but also to actually be able to use Wi-Fi in all hardware in 2021 in both Windows and Linux distros (not snark, literally had to compile custom drivers for my no name netbook).