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A comment on Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows driver development in Rust”. Parent comment

Re:Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows drive... by pjmlp on Sunday September 24, 2023 @01:40PM (#37635311)
Xerox PARC and ETHZ workstations were fully written in GC enabled languages, including the device drivers.

Smalltalk, Interlip-D, Mesa/Cedar, Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon

Source code is available for some of them, many home made OSes in non GC enabled languages are far from meeting the capabilities of any of those systems.

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" - Computer History Museum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/Sources/Kerne...

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Re:Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows drive... by Yoric on Sunday September 24, 2023 @05:11PM (#37637237)
Very interesting, thanks!

Do these include subsystems with fairly high-performance requirements (GUIs, high-volume network services, etc.)?

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Re:Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows drive... by pjmlp on Sunday September 24, 2023 @05:49PM (#37637526)
In what concerns Xerox PARC, enough stuff on Bitsavers, about how everything run on top of those graphical workstations, in a distributed computing environment.

Likewise ETHZ IT department during the late 1990's used several Oberon workstations.

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Re:Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows drive... by Yoric on Monday September 25, 2023 @12:00PM (#37646044)
Thanks!
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Re:Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows drive... by theamk on Monday September 25, 2023 @11:55PM (#37654119)
Don't those systems have substantially less capabilities? In particular, swap/paging, virtual memory, multi-processor support, and low-ish latency?

GC is easy if you don't have to worry about those problems.

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Re:Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows drive... by pjmlp on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @09:11AM (#37658784)
The Xerox systems were more modern and demanding than UNIX, for their time.
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Re:Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows drive... by theamk on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @10:23AM (#37659809)
For their time, sure.

But that doesn't help with today's devices. Even $10 boards are multicore now and come with hundreds megs of RAM.

At least in garbage collected OS design, the lessons from 1970's and 1980's are interesting, but do not directly apply to modern systems.

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