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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • I wouldn't be so sure HURD will emerge. Why? Because nobody lost money betting against the release of HURD :-)

    --Nat

    • One other thing I think the free software community has learned as a whole that will play a prominent role in making HURD usable and popular is how to port an OS across architectures. BSD lite started out as an Intel OS. I think. (Actually, it was a descendant of a VAX OS, which was a descendant of a PDP OS. But who's counting?)

    BSD started life as a set of patches to AT&T V7 Unix and it initially ran on PDP 11s. AT&T had that same kernel running on several different architectures at that point

    • Well, I knew there was a lot more porting involved in there that I was leaving out. I specifically knew about Motorola chips and some of the other things you mentioned. Yes, UNIX has always been very portable. I consider the "free software community" to be a descendant of that same group that was doing that work back then.

      I do know that NetBSD reached new heights of portability. They reached the point a long time ago when a single driver could be used in the OS on different architectures. Very modula

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

    • Let me rephrase again. :)

      What the community has learned is not how to port an OS. That's textbook. (Well, sorta.) What the community has learned is how to throw the open, distributed development model at the task of OS portability effectively. Very effectively. I'm anxious to see it thrown at HURD.

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

  • ...though for different reasons than Nat :-)

    The reason I'm skeptical for may be obsolete by now, and I'd be happy to be corrected on this. The reason microkernels didn't use to fly despite being a very nice design, was simple: performance, or the lack thereof. All those layers of abstraction and encapsulation simply took too much time to go through. In other words: the performance of microkernels sucked (compared with monolithic kernels).

    That was the state in mid-nineties, when I knew some of the

    • I meant to mention a little more about the performance issue. One thing I was trying to get at but failed to mention explicitly is that many of us are now using a microkernel on a daily basis. You specifically: I know you are because I saw you with an ibook at YAPC. :) OS X is built on a microkernel, and all you new Mac users can tell me how the performance is.

      I would not be surprised if the HURD I am predicting has poor performance for awhile. I am optimistic that if Apple can make a usable microkern

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

      • > OS X is built on a microkernel, and all you new Mac users can tell me how the performance is.

        That's easy: my computers are always too slow :-) be they 8-bit home micros or 1024-node Crays.

  • The Hurd will go nowhere because no one needs it for anything, and it doesn't interest anyone.

    OK, I am overgeneralizing and oversimplifying, but not by much.
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