Re: Functional programming

On 7 September 2015 at 13:41, Sergio Tortosa Benedito
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Oh, I love reading about OSes, the problem is that none of them tend to be
> useful, mainly due lack of drivers, indeed I wish someone made a thesis
> about common/universal drivers.

Well, it depends what you mean by "useful"!

Different people have different definitions. I know quite a few people
running FreeBSD as their desktop OS. I find it too hard, myself, short
of both apps and drivers -- but it is not so for everyone.

One ray of hope is that today you can do almost anything with a rich
web browser: email, chat, newsgroups, productivity apps and much more.

So if a new OS has a really good browser, it has the single most
important tool.

> BTW, let me ask, is Plan 9 much better tjan Unix? And why do you say modern
> unix is not lightweight? There's any way we could make them more
> ljghtweight?

Depends what you mean by "better". I don't know a lot about Plan 9,
but it is what the creators of Unix did next. It is Unix 2.0.

In Unix, "everything is a file" -- but not all files are equal. Some
files have special semantics for device control. And original Unix did
not include networking, or a GUI, so when those were added on later,
they don't appear as simple files in the filesystem. Later, the
process map was added as a virtual filesystem, so today, Linux has
/proc and /sys and you *can* manipulate processes via special magic
files.

Plan 9 came later. Far more things are files in Plan 9 than they are
in Linux. So, it's conceptually cleaner, simpler, more logical.

And Plan 9 integrates networking into the kernel. Not only your own
machine's processes are visible in the filesystem, but those of all
connected Plan 9 machines as well. Processes can move around the
network and so on -- that is conceptually "better" but obviously has
major security concerns.

But if you're on an x86-32 machine, you cannot run a binary from your
colleague's ARM machine, say. Different processors, different
binaries.

So Plan 9 2.0 fixed that by abstracting away the CPU instruction set
as well. It's platform-neutral, like Java, but as part of the OS
kernel. So the same binary can run on an x86-64 or on ARM or on
anything else that the OS runs on. It doesn't even need its own
computer -- it can run as a web-browser plugin on top of another OS.

Plan 9 2.0 is called Inferno, and it is arguably "better" than Plan 9
as much as Plan 9 is "better" than Unix.

However, Plan 9 kept developing after Inferno forked off. They are not
in sync any more.

But neither caught on, neither was a commercial success -- one element
of this being that neither was originally FOSS as we know it.

So Unix moved on without them.



-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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