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Re:Herd Mentality by GeneralMaximus on Saturday October 24, 2009 @01:39AM (#900161)
I think the benefits of having a diverse OS landscape are much greater than the cost of a little increased complexity. We already have languages that run on virtual machines, and we have the POSIX standard. Software portability shouldn't be a problem.
Re:Herd Mentality by jodrellblank on Saturday October 24, 2009 @09:50AM (#900452)
It should be a problem, otherwise the new OS would be so similar there would be little point in it existing...
Re:Herd Mentality by GeneralMaximus on Saturday October 24, 2009 @10:34AM (#900484)
A POSIX compatibility layer should be enough. You can easily run UNIX programs on Windows using Cygwin, for example.
Re:Herd Mentality by jodrellblank on Saturday October 24, 2009 @12:54PM (#900651)
What you want is a new and innovative OS that is also backwards/cross compatible and standards compliant?
Re:Herd Mentality by GeneralMaximus on Sunday October 25, 2009 @01:22PM (#901797)
Haiku actually does this. Haiku is not a UNIX, but there's a fairly complete POSIX layer for building UNIX programs. As far as I know, Syllable and SkyOS do something like this, too (I might be wrong, though).
Re:Herd Mentality by eru on Saturday October 24, 2009 @04:11PM (#900889)
What's the problem? The standards compliant layer would perhaps just not be as fast as the native metaphors.
Re:Herd Mentality by steveklabnik on Saturday October 24, 2009 @05:08PM (#900943)
You'd be surprised at what's possible. I'm actually working on one right now.