Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @01:09PM
(#18443182)
With that attitude you'll never be able to ditch legacy cruft, and there's quite a lot of it in POSIX. I agree with the other poster that a compatibility layer in the form of virtualization and/or emulation should be sufficient, as long as your new OS brings something to the table that's desirable. Shunt the legacy crap off into its own contained environment and build a nice new clean one for new stuff to use.
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Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by nixpulvis on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @01:12PM
(#18443209)
I still think there are a plenty of reasons to support POSIX in many places. As someone who's been running fish for a while, I can appreciate the common ground it provides across the current UNIX ecosystem, but it's not like translating a bash script to fish is impossible.
There should always be a supported standard, but there should be nothing forcing you too it. This is the freedom we need to demand of our OSes.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by johannes1234321 on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @01:22PM
(#18443315)
Yeas, in a imaginary world replacing POSIX would be great. But that's not an easy endeavor. 30 years of legacy tied to it.
As long as you don't have POSIX only special interest users will use your system.
I believe the only way forward is to start on POSIX and then move on step by step and deprecating part by part.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @02:00PM
(#18443730)
In the same imaginary world, creating a new POSIX OS that isn't Linux is a giant waste of time just from gap in drivers alone. If you're going to ditch all that hardware support then you may as well ditch POSIX and its crap while you're at it.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by pjmlp on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @03:36AM
(#18448439)
Which is a reason why despite disliking what Google did to Sun and how hard they make to use the NDK, in the end I appreciate their Android design.
No POSIX for userspace as official API, rather ISO C and C++ APIs plus Android native APIs.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @06:24PM
(#18445858)
Unless you have some portable standard to target, you just tied the entire universe to exactly 1 OS implementation. I would like to not do that.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @10:46PM
(#18447302)
Bull. People developed software for multiple completely different computer architectures throughout the 80s and 90s. People do it today between different game console platforms in addition to operating systems. Even if you try and target something like SDL or a web browser your abstraction won't save you from a platform's quirks once you reach a certain level of complexity and then you'll have to work around it anyway.
Hell, even between supposedly POSIX systems there's a lot of #ifdef going on to make things work.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by ansible on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @02:13PM
(#18443872)
My issues with POSIX stem from the fact that writing completely correct code which handles signals, interruptable operating system calls, and threads is hard. There are plenty of little details that are easy to get wrong. And you won't know you've gotten something wrong until much later when some confluence of events occurs.
I don't know if deprecating parts of POSIX is going to work any better than deprecating parts of C++. If all the bad stuff is still there waiting to be misused...
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by monocasa on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @02:58PM
(#18444318)
Or successfully pull off the library OS concept with POSIX as a first class citizen. Z/OS is most of the way there. NT has tried a couple times with the POSIX subsystem first, and now their Windows Subsystem for Linux work came out of MS Research's drawbridge library OS work.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by pjmlp on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @03:38AM
(#18448447)
And SQL Server on Linux makes use of library OS concept as well.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by monocasa on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @10:48AM
(#18450722)
That's heavily overstated.
Re:Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust
by pjmlp on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @11:55AM
(#18451320)