Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#2Yep, just the usual portability issues.
POSIX is stuck in the days when UNIX software was plain CLI or daemons, with keyboards and teletype as devices.
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#3It shows that we need a better IPC api, and also some primitives for dealing with graphics cards (Linux deals with it through ioctl, for example, which is a hack).
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#4It shows that we need a better IPC api, and also some primitives for dealing with graphics cards (Linux deals with it through ioctl, for example, which is a hack).
Frankly everything is a hack at some level or other.
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#5Yep, just the usual portability issues. POSIX is stuck in the days when UNIX software was plain CLI or daemons, with keyboards and teletype as devices.
The good old days, you mean. Long may they continue.
On a more serious note, this is not happening because POSIX is bad or irrelevant but because people a) don't know about it and b) even if they did, reinventing the wheel is more fun.
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#6Yep, just the usual portability issues. POSIX is stuck in the days when UNIX software was plain CLI or daemons, with keyboards and teletype as devices.
The good old days, you mean. Long may they continue. On a more serious note, this is not happening because POSIX is bad or irrelevant but because people a) don't know about it and b) even if they did, reinventing the wheel is more fun.
The cascade has to continue cascading...
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#7Yep, just the usual portability issues. POSIX is stuck in the days when UNIX software was plain CLI or daemons, with keyboards and teletype as devices.
The good old days, you mean. Long may they continue. On a more serious note, this is not happening because POSIX is bad or irrelevant but because people a) don't know about it and b) even if they did, reinventing the wheel is more fun.
I would argue passing around all data as text is suboptimal, not only from a performance point of view but also in terms of robustness. Parsing plain text using regular expressions and suchlike can lead to some useful outcomes but it's easy to derive false positives from this. On the other hand a binary-based object-oriented approach can give better performance and make it easier to parse data.
This is just one example of where the old ways aren't necessarily the best. I'm fairly confident we could come up with something better than POSIX if we were willing to make the effort.
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The good old days, you mean. Long may they continue. On a more serious note, this is not happening because POSIX is bad or irrelevant but because people a) don't know about it and b) even if they did, reinventing the wheel is more fun.
I would argue passing around all data as text is suboptimal, not only from a performance point of view but also in terms of robustness. Parsing plain text using regular expressions and suchlike can lead to some useful outcomes but it's easy to derive false positives from this. On the other hand a binary-based object-oriented approach can give better performance and make it easier to parse data. This is just one examp…
> passing around all data as text is suboptimal
POSIX is not Unix.
Passing data around as text is a tenet of the Unix philosophy, while AFAIK POSIX doesn't mandate any of that.
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#9Yep, just the usual portability issues. POSIX is stuck in the days when UNIX software was plain CLI or daemons, with keyboards and teletype as devices.
The good old days, you mean. Long may they continue. On a more serious note, this is not happening because POSIX is bad or irrelevant but because people a) don't know about it and b) even if they did, reinventing the wheel is more fun.
Not everyone agree those were the good old days.
For me the good old days were the time spend with Amiga 500, discovering the world of Smalltalk, Oberon and all Xerox PARC research and other pioneers.
I got into UNIX via Xenix, and used almost every commercial flavour of it, but don't consider it the good old days.
The fact that POSIX is stuck in a PDP-11 world, is a proof that no big in the industry, with power to drive POSIX forward, is seeing as a relevant OS API for anything besides writing daemons and CLI applications accessible via SSH.
Re: Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf]
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue passing around all data as text is suboptimal, not only from a performance point of view but also in terms of robustness. Parsing plain text using regular expressions and suchlike can lead to some useful outcomes but it's easy to derive false positives from this. On the other hand a binary-based object-oriented approach can give better performance and make it easier to parse data. This is just one examp…
> passing around all data as text is suboptimal POSIX is not Unix. Passing data around as text is a tenet of the Unix philosophy, while AFAIK POSIX doesn't mandate any of that.
> "POSIX is not Unix."
"This is just one example of where the old ways aren't necessarily the best."