Re:Prossimo – Memory safety for the Internet's most critical...
by tialaramex on Friday June 18, 2021 @03:21PM
(#27553871)
> Linux will not be forever
Linux is thirty years old. And Linux isn't something from whole cloth, it's a Unix, it didn't have some legal and technical baggage that UNIX® brand Unix had but it's a Unix. And Unix is over sixty years old.
We may very well be done. Unix isn't the best conceivable Operating System, but it seems like it's good enough, and in being good enough it became so enormously popular that any new alternative has to be night-and-day better or why bother?
I'm reminded of the Two's Complement Integer thing. Historically it was unclear if this was the "best" way for integers to work. Hardware existed, and sold well decades ago, with some other ideas for how integers could be represented and calculated. But, gradually, over time, even if Two's Complement wasn't clearly the best, it was clearly the most popular, and the others weren't clearly better so why fight it? Sure enough, "Two's Complement Integers" get to just be how integers work by default in newer languages.
If Linus and all the subsystems people were screaming "Nothing but C, under any circumstances" then perhaps you could imagine a competitor to Linux comes along in ten, twenty, thirty years. But so long as they remain open to changes that actually have good results, they're going to stay on top.
Linux is thirty years old. And Linux isn't something from whole cloth, it's a Unix, it didn't have some legal and technical baggage that UNIX® brand Unix had but it's a Unix. And Unix is over sixty years old.
We may very well be done. Unix isn't the best conceivable Operating System, but it seems like it's good enough, and in being good enough it became so enormously popular that any new alternative has to be night-and-day better or why bother?
I'm reminded of the Two's Complement Integer thing. Historically it was unclear if this was the "best" way for integers to work. Hardware existed, and sold well decades ago, with some other ideas for how integers could be represented and calculated. But, gradually, over time, even if Two's Complement wasn't clearly the best, it was clearly the most popular, and the others weren't clearly better so why fight it? Sure enough, "Two's Complement Integers" get to just be how integers work by default in newer languages.
If Linus and all the subsystems people were screaming "Nothing but C, under any circumstances" then perhaps you could imagine a competitor to Linux comes along in ten, twenty, thirty years. But so long as they remain open to changes that actually have good results, they're going to stay on top.