[HN Gopher] Comparison of Operating System Complexity (2020) [pdf] ___________________________________________________________________ Comparison of Operating System Complexity (2020) [pdf] Author : marttt Score : 34 points Date : 2021-11-27 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (pspodcasting.net) (TXT) w3m dump (pspodcasting.net) | JulianMorrison wrote: | The author likes ed. | | From this you may draw any further conclusions necessary. | [deleted] | ReleaseCandidat wrote: | A Plan 9 user yelling at clouds. | | He does have some valid points, but his insults don't help. | | And no, troff is neither elegant nor capable ;) | woodruffw wrote: | > And no, troff is neither elegant nor capable ;) | | I accurately guessed that this essay/screed(?) was typeset in | troff, given the abundance of minor formatting and typesetting | errors. | | This particular kind of "return to tradition" OS zealotry has | always deeply bewildered me: our own dear author can't complete | an essay in troff without scattering errors all over the place, | so why in the _world_ are they encouraging professional users | to give up all of the functionality that _prevents_ these | errors? | Bancakes wrote: | Just what _is_ inside modern software? Why is Windows 95 Word | tiny but office 365 Word needs gigabytes of RAM? | | What is happening there? Putting 100K of integers in a linked | list gives you +100K of overhead. Putting 100K of text in Word | gives you 100M overhead. Ridiculous. | drainyard wrote: | A lot of modern programmers don't practice non pessimization. | Back of the envelope: what is feasibly the best this should | perform? So you end up with things that take up way more | resources tham necessary because anyone has at least 8GB of RAM | these days. | | Back when there were more extreme hardware constraints you | couldn't ship if your program was going to take up all your RAM | in a few minutes. | | I'm guessing this and that it has a lot more features (bot | necessarily necessary features) these days so automatically a | lot more engineers which means a lot more inexperienced | engineers because there are only so many experienced ones. | musicale wrote: | Office is what, 80M lines of code? Impossible for any human | to understand. | | I expect it is only added to because 1) nobody understands | what would happen if you removed something and 2) if you | intentionally or inadvertently remove some obscure feature | then it breaks the workflow for people who inexplicably | depended on that feature. | [deleted] | imachine1980_ wrote: | i was think about this like one hour ago, start why i need to | config docker to make php website, then migrate to when i start | to think i don't funking know anything in linux(after years of | using it), how x11 works(like really),not talking about multi | threading in the kernel, the idea of know how anything works is | relic of the past,i work in some next.js project have more file | than some of the old legacy UNIX, this is become insane but i | don't think this will slow down any time soon. | rackjack wrote: | Don't feel too bad about X11... iirc it's extremely difficult | to be compliant with the standard, since they apparently | codified the quirks of the different existing implementations | into the standard itself. Wayland is purportedly more sane. | | Relevant discussion: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418992 | kaba0 wrote: | Oh and you haven't even started looking at the hardware below | all that! | | But on a serious note, this complexity is not all useless. A | significant part of it is essential complexity that can't be | reduced. And frankly, these layered abstractions allow us to do | any real work. Just understand your stack very well and one or | possibly two layers below -- that is what makes you a great | developer. | pjmlp wrote: | I got to learn about Minoca OS, unfortunately it is yet another | POSIX clone, we already have enough of those. | rackjack wrote: | Does anybody have other texts on UNIX or proto-UNIX history? I | found the comparison between `ed` and `vi` enlightening. | musicale wrote: | I was disappointed that Multics wasn't on the list. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-27 23:00 UTC)