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> As to using modern technology, though, one of the main modern things > that OSes seem to avoid is higher-level languages. Why is everything > still written in C, for instance? Drivers, and maybe kernels, I > understand, but anything else? It's an embarassment. s/still written in C/still written in C, C++, Java, and other languages that haven't even caught up to Smalltalk which came out in, what, 1979?/ > I _still_ think BeOS had stinkloads of really awesome technology that > basically no one else is using. And stinkloads of really neat ideas that stink on ice when you actually try to use them. Filesystem-based attributes, for example. > Now Apple is using one of the main > great things, filesystem-based attributes, No, they're moving away from them (where did you think Be got the idea from: Apple's damned Resource Forks). Spotlight's database is a file, all it's getting from the filesystem is notifications so it doesn't have to walk the file tree every five minutes to keep in sync. > stuff, just used very intelligently. For instance, every time I use OS > X I'm reminded of how awesome it was in BeOS to have a separate thread > devoted to every single window. Um, that's kind of normal. Most OS X apps have a thread devoted to each window. Your bottleneck is probably between the CPU and the GPU, or else a funky app. And there's WAY better ways of getting realtime response than BeOS tower of horrid C++ threads. The Amiga kicked Be's ass that way... you got a SERVER thread for every window, plus a real-time message system that only bothered the app when you actually had a completed user interaction. And it was more responsive on a 7.14 MHz 68000 than BeOS (or MacOS9, or Linux) on a 100 MHz PPC. > OTOH, there are tons and tons of really tried and true ideas being > blandly ignored by non-research software developers. Why the hell > isn't something like Zeroconf in everything, instead of just a few > Apple-specific pieces of software? Because Microsoft has reinvented it as a new security flaw: network plug and play. > Why aren't threads used > bloody everywhere to make the system at least _appear_ more responsive? Because threads are an admission that your IPC model sucks, so processes are too expensive to blow on every GUI element. Processes connected through fast zero-copy message queues are the way to go. > No, I just think it's an absolute embarassment that the "best" OS out > there right now is based on an OS that was a hack-job 35 years ago, No it bloody well wasn't. UNIX was a brilliant piece of design simplification by some of the most brilliant people on the planet. I'm *still* waiting for someone to come up with an equally brilliant model to clean up all the stupid clutter that GUIs have spawned. The Bell Labs folks had some great ideas for that in 8.5 and Plan 9, but they had zero design sense and it got flushed away. QNX Photon/Neutrino may have some good ideas, but it's locked up and proprietary. I still think that we lost an awful lot when Sun backed down and dropped NeWS. Now *that* is what they should open-source, not Solaris. > Even OS X is an embarassment. They've done a pretty good job of > creating a well-integrated sufficiently functional interface, but the > amount of hacking they had to do to sit Aqua on Darwin is just painful. Um, well, no. There's a lot of unnecessary hacking in there... NeXT did it better, Plan 9 IPC and lightweight fork() would be even nicer. > "Oh, NetInfo, yeah, _everyone_'s using that." You ever used a NeXT? NetInfo is orthogonal to Aqua. Completely unrelated hate. > I'm praying that OS X did "Spotlight" the right way, meaning good > filesystem metadata, integrating throughout the entire system, but > given that it's still based on hateful HFS, it seems unlikely, even > with Dominic doing the work (or heading it? I don't know). No, you'll hate it. It's not even based on HFS. Thank god.There's stuff above here
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