Rob Pike 2004, https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...
The problem here is that there aren't a lot of alternatives. You could use Windows, which is like listening only to music by MC Hammer, or you could use a Mac, which is like listening only to music by Duran Duran.
Because of software/backwards compatibility concerns, and how dependent everything is on the underlying OS, it's really hard to change anything in the OS, especially the fundamental design. It'd be nice to make a clean-sheet new OS, but good luck getting anyone to adopt it: look at how well Plan9 and BeOS fared.
You say that like it were a bad thing.
Whereas Mac OS, Windows, iOS, Android, ChromeOS have moved into more productive language runtimes, with rich frameworks, improving safety across OS layers, even if they have a few bumps along the way.
There's nothing preventing you from running different language runtimes and such on Linux/Unix systems; people do it all the time. Have you not noticed Mono? It's been around for many years. Plus frameworks like Qt; that certainly wasn't around before the late 90s.
A few more releases and in around 10 years, Win32 will be drinking beers with Carbon.
Mono and Qt don't change the architecture of UNIX and their adoption across UNIX variants isn't a game changer.
No, it hasn't. Filenames are still case-insensitive (and in a terrible way, where it seems to remember how they were first typed but that can never be changed), backslashes are still used for path separators instead of escaping characters, and the worst of all is that drive letters are still in use, which is an utterly archaic concept from the days of systems with dual floppy drives. Also, try making a file with a double-quote character in it, or a question mark. I've run into trouble before copying files from a Linux system to a Windows system because of the reserved characters on Windows.
>Mono and Qt don't change the architecture of UNIX and their adoption across UNIX variants isn't a game changer.
Nothing you've mentioned has changed the architecture of Windows. The fundamental architecture of Windows hasn't changed at all since WinNT 4.0 (or maybe 3.5); it just has an ugly new UI slapped on top and some slightly different administration tools.
The Windows (Win32) environment suffers those limitations. It also suffers 20+ years of strong binary compatibility, broad hardware support, and consistent reliability that systems of similar class (e.g. Linux desktops) can't match.
If it makes you feel any better, drive letters are a convenient illusion made possible by the Win32 subsystem; NT has no such concept and mounts file systems into the object hierarchy (NT is fundamentally object oriented - a more modern and flexible design than is provided by UNIX).
The fundamental architecture of Windows, the kernel, hasn't changed in ages because it doesn't need to; it is far more sophisticated than UNIX will ever be and far more sophisticated than you will ever need. The fundamental architecture of Win32 hasn't changed since 32-bits was an exciting concept and it won't change because the market has said loud and clear that they want Windows-level compatibility. See Windows RT and The Year of the Linux Desktop for evidence that users aren't clamoring to ditch Win32 in favor of something more pure.
Another case in point: it allowed MS to write a layer on top of the NT kernel to run unmodified Linux binaries. (Windows subsystem for Linux).
An API translation layer doesn't prove that a kernel is "more sophisticated" than another; that's just fanboyism.
Is that a claim you can substantiate? I admit I stopped paying attention around the time that scale-up of expensive servers with high minimum specs + expensive software licenses was overtaken by scale-out approaches + open source, but NT never struck me as being particularly stable in the face of badly written software and drivers. Has it improved a lot in this dimension over the past 15 years?
Nowadays on Windows 10 it means UWP, Win32 and Linux syscalls.
In theory someone could call the ntdll.dll and create a new personality but those APIs are undocumented and only possibly made available to Microsoft partners.
For us, Windows pathanmes are just fine.
As for Windows architecture, maybe you should spend some hours reading Windows Internals book series, BUILD and Channel 9 sessions about MinWin, Drawbridge, Picoprocesses, UWP, User Space Drivers, Secure Kernel,....
I'd love to read the source code myself to see how it works instead
(Three versions of NT have been leaked; NT 4.0, Windows 2000, an the Windows Research Kit (which is Win2k3) -- they are all trivial to find online (first page of Google results).)
Not exactly "you can get it if you want it", but not "you can't even get it over our dead body", either.
Only for new applications. These written for the old ABIs still trip over after the 240th character, even though the FileSystem supports much more.
To put in another words: I belive the inherent unix limitations (process model for terminals, process signalling, lack of structure) are still less limiting than DOS assumptions about the consumer hardware and applications of the 80's.
Unix applications written using old assumptions (e.g. ?14? characters max for symbol names in libraries, ?16? bit address space, assuming the C library knows of gets) can have problems on modern systems, too.
Lots of people still use Windows applications with the limitations mentioned here, either because they refuse to give up their 1990s Windows applications, or the weird little ISVs refuse to update their code.
All programs of interest have migrated and there is also a compatibility layer redirecting older programs to write to a fake system directory.
Windows roots are on VMS, not UNIX. There is hardly anything UNIX related on its architecture, regarding kernel design.
What about something like this: https://www.redox-os.org/
Its written in Rust not C. In fact, according to the github stats, there is no C.
>Rust 72.4%
>Shell 13.2%
>Makefile 12.5%
>TeX 1.9%
In view of that, it's only natural that big segments of software beyond the OS like word processors are also stagnant. We don't actually need a diverse marketplace of competing word processing ideas anymore... the problem is fundamentally solved as far as the public is concerned. It's not as exciting for software developers, but it's totally natural for it to happen.
Now if you do want page layout, I think the people who like to do that use something different — not Word. So I don't think they've really cornered any market, unless the market is people who want to use Word.
Apple failed miserably to create a new OS, decided to buy a company instead and they happened to get the one where Steve Jobs was.
NextSTEP was partly based on UNIX, because it was competing against Solaris and needed some compatibility for easing the port of applications.
It used a micro-kernel like architecture, drivers where written in Objective-C, the whole userspace used the Foundation libraries and the bundles concept, the GUI was based on Postscript engine.
All very little to do with what a UNIX is.
Also if Gassé didn't ask the crazy amount of money he did, Mac OS X would probably be based on BeOS, which didn't have anything to do with UNIX.
Try and read it this way:
"We really are using a 1970s era operating system ..."