8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

Re:8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 by jacquesm on Friday June 20, 2014 @07:56AM (#7920329)

I sense the frustration around this subject is building. What I'm afraid of is that once it boils over into action it will lead to a repetition of moves. That's the hard one, to get a 'fresh start' going is ridiculously easy and one of the reasons we have this mess in the first place.

Very hard to avoid the 'now you have two problems' trap.

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Re:8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 by InclinedPlane on Friday June 20, 2014 @09:17AM (#7920537)

Indeed. The problem with starting over is that anything you start over with is going to be simpler, at first. Thus potentially faster, easier, etc, etc.

Rewrites are hard and costly, which is rarely taken into account. Even just maintaining a competent fork is hard enough.

I think it's probably worth the effort, but I'm not quite sure how you get from A to B without just having some super competent eccentric multi-billionaire finance a series of massive development projects.

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Re:8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 by aurelianito on Friday June 20, 2014 @11:29AM (#7921113)

> I think it's probably worth the effort, but I'm not quite sure how you get from A to B without just having some super competent eccentric multi-billionaire finance a series of massive development projects.

And Elon Musk is busy doing rockets and electric cars!

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Re:8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 by lloeki on Friday June 20, 2014 @11:18AM (#7921044)

I think it didn't happen because the people feeling this way are precisely in the situation to understand how vast and hard an undertaking it is, not only to achieve, but also to succeed.

Few have attempted a reboot, yet the zeitgeist is definitely there: ZFS, Wayland, Metal, A7, even TempleOS (or whatever its name is these days). Folks are starting to say themselves 'hey, we built things, we learned a ton, we do feel the result, while useful, is a mess but we now genuinely understand we need to start afresh and how'. It's as if everyone were using LISP on x86 and suddenly realised they might as well use LISP machines.

I too fear we just loop over, yet my hope is that in doing that looping, our field iteratively improves.

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