[HN Gopher] Comparison of Operating System Complexity (2020) [pdf]
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Comparison of Operating System Complexity (2020) [pdf]
Author : marttt
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-11-27 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pspodcasting.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (pspodcasting.net)
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| The author likes ed.
|
| From this you may draw any further conclusions necessary.
| [deleted]
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| A Plan 9 user yelling at clouds.
|
| He does have some valid points, but his insults don't help.
|
| And no, troff is neither elegant nor capable ;)
| woodruffw wrote:
| > And no, troff is neither elegant nor capable ;)
|
| I accurately guessed that this essay/screed(?) was typeset in
| troff, given the abundance of minor formatting and typesetting
| errors.
|
| This particular kind of "return to tradition" OS zealotry has
| always deeply bewildered me: our own dear author can't complete
| an essay in troff without scattering errors all over the place,
| so why in the _world_ are they encouraging professional users
| to give up all of the functionality that _prevents_ these
| errors?
| Bancakes wrote:
| Just what _is_ inside modern software? Why is Windows 95 Word
| tiny but office 365 Word needs gigabytes of RAM?
|
| What is happening there? Putting 100K of integers in a linked
| list gives you +100K of overhead. Putting 100K of text in Word
| gives you 100M overhead. Ridiculous.
| drainyard wrote:
| A lot of modern programmers don't practice non pessimization.
| Back of the envelope: what is feasibly the best this should
| perform? So you end up with things that take up way more
| resources tham necessary because anyone has at least 8GB of RAM
| these days.
|
| Back when there were more extreme hardware constraints you
| couldn't ship if your program was going to take up all your RAM
| in a few minutes.
|
| I'm guessing this and that it has a lot more features (bot
| necessarily necessary features) these days so automatically a
| lot more engineers which means a lot more inexperienced
| engineers because there are only so many experienced ones.
| musicale wrote:
| Office is what, 80M lines of code? Impossible for any human
| to understand.
|
| I expect it is only added to because 1) nobody understands
| what would happen if you removed something and 2) if you
| intentionally or inadvertently remove some obscure feature
| then it breaks the workflow for people who inexplicably
| depended on that feature.
| [deleted]
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| i was think about this like one hour ago, start why i need to
| config docker to make php website, then migrate to when i start
| to think i don't funking know anything in linux(after years of
| using it), how x11 works(like really),not talking about multi
| threading in the kernel, the idea of know how anything works is
| relic of the past,i work in some next.js project have more file
| than some of the old legacy UNIX, this is become insane but i
| don't think this will slow down any time soon.
| rackjack wrote:
| Don't feel too bad about X11... iirc it's extremely difficult
| to be compliant with the standard, since they apparently
| codified the quirks of the different existing implementations
| into the standard itself. Wayland is purportedly more sane.
|
| Relevant discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418992
| kaba0 wrote:
| Oh and you haven't even started looking at the hardware below
| all that!
|
| But on a serious note, this complexity is not all useless. A
| significant part of it is essential complexity that can't be
| reduced. And frankly, these layered abstractions allow us to do
| any real work. Just understand your stack very well and one or
| possibly two layers below -- that is what makes you a great
| developer.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I got to learn about Minoca OS, unfortunately it is yet another
| POSIX clone, we already have enough of those.
| rackjack wrote:
| Does anybody have other texts on UNIX or proto-UNIX history? I
| found the comparison between `ed` and `vi` enlightening.
| musicale wrote:
| I was disappointed that Multics wasn't on the list.
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