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My prediction
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--Larry Wall in <199911192358.PAA24109@kiev.wall.org>
Did I say I expect Perl to do the right thing? :-)
--Larry Wall in <199911200217.SAA24898@kiev.wall.org>
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I'm skeptical, too... (Score:2)
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
Re:I'm skeptical, too... (Score:2)
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 microkernel OS, the HURD people can figure it out, too. (Ask me in a year; I may take it all back.)
I see yet another parallel here with the Mozilla project. When I finally started hearing good things about Mozilla and tried it, it was painfully slow and ate far too much memory. I gave it up for dead (again...), but it wasn't long until I heard "everybody" (for some value of "everybody") was using it, tried it out, and discovered they had fixed the performance. I expect HURD to go through a similar cycle. I pray Perl 6 doesn't, but if early results give disappointing benchmarks, I'll be there saying "Give it time."
To be honest, I'm still a bit skeptical myself. But having watched some projects go through the cycle of monstrous developer interest, near invisibility, and sudden success, I have an inclination HURD's time may be sooner than everyone expects.
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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Re:I'm skeptical, too... (Score:2)
> 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.