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Comment by packetslave | Hacker News Reader

SVR4 came out 30 years ago. I think it's time to let it go.

Aah the joys of false progressivism.

I hear that representing the absence of value as a number was invented about 6000 years ago, perhaps we should abandon that as antiquated as well..

also, to wit, a Unix kernel of recent vintage:

    $ uname -msr
    OpenBSD 6.3 amd64
    $ du -skc bsd.rd bsd  
    9664    bsd.rd
    12912   bsd
    22576   total

vs, say, a Linux kernel of recent vintage:

    $ uname -msr
    Linux 4.9.0-8-amd64 x86_64
    $ du -skc /boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-8-amd64 /boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-8-amd64 /lib/modules/4.9.0-8-amd64
    4152	/boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-8-amd64
    21616	/boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-8-amd64
    212248	/lib/modules/4.9.0-8-amd64
    238016	total

yes, there are likely more drivers in the latter. highly doubt there is an order of magnitude more though.

not to mention some 'modern' npm+webpack monstrosity.

that said, given the latter, i can hardly fault a <10Mb go executable as 'excessive', so you're right on that front.

This turned me on.

Fun fact: OpenBSD 6.4 /bsd kernel can be shrunk from 14.8MB to 6.6MB. With gzip.

> yes, there are likely more drivers in the latter. highly doubt there is an order of magnitude more though.

That's exactly what they are; ~180M of those 212M are in drivers/. And even outside that, it includes stuff like fs/ocfs2, which I don't think OpenBSD supports.

I'm fine with letting it go! I just don't understand why they're claiming this is "the UNIX way" as if that's a good thing.

I hate to be trollbait, but: "the Unix way" is less about the size of programs, and more about programs being built as composable, modular components that interact together over a common interface.

Curious people can read more about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy or https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/~thenry/resources/unix_art/ch01s...

The websocketd site outlines this fairly well with the big quote on their homepage.

Looked at another way, a Unix-like ecosystem satisfies two of the principles of a SOLID software architecture: the Single Responsibility Principle and (arguably) the Open-Closed Principle.

If websocketd focuses on handling the nuts and bolts of websocket connections and invoking other programs and piping data into and out of them over a standard interface, then it's a Unix-like architecture, even if it's a fat, monolithic, statically linked binary.

The unix way is 'decoupled microservices', breaking down components in to small pieces for reuse, it continues to be used and reinvented in different contexts. Both monolith and decoupled components have their cheerleaders but simply dismissing either as 'not a good thing' doesn't add anything to the debate.

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