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Comment by jagged-chisel | Hacker News Reader

How well does FreeBSD support a “modern” web backend? Does Java run here? Mono (C#)? Node.js? PostgreSQL? Any noSQL databases?

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For the most part: yes. The one I'm not sure of is Mono.

That being said, some tooling assumes linux sometimes, but the popular stuff is generally gtg, especially if you get it via the ports tree.

dotnet core is not supported

In the server sense, FreeBSD will do essentially everything that Linux does as far as running software. For your examples, yes.

Haven't tried Mono, Node, or anything NoSQL, but Java, Ruby, and Postgres all run pretty well. It is runtime-compatibile with Linux executables and you can even install a linux distro in a jail

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/setting-up-a-debian-linux...

here people mess with FreeBSD afaik:

Building the .NET Core SDK on FreeBSD

https://github.com/dotnet/source-build/issues/1139

I guess calling POSIX modern is a point of view, unless a language runtime is bound to Linux specific syscalls, any UNIX like OS will run "modern" web backends.

From that point of view, you can even do "modern" web backends on IBM and Unisys mainframes, using their POSIX environments.

And yes, they do actually support everything on that list, by the way, mainframes invented noSQL databases before SQL was a thing, have a look on ISAM.

Very, very few things depend on Linux-specific syscalls. There are two reasons for this: first, they are unportable, so you need another code path for everything !Linux anyway, and even when you only care about Linux you can't assume those syscalls are available, because you first need to get them into the kernel, then into glibc, which is a separate project, and then you need to ship them in the distro, which in some cases (RHEL) means either waiting half a decade or porting it to a kernel half a decade old.

And no, there aren't many things you can run on z/OS POSIX environment, because it fails to support absolutely basic things, like fork(2).

>mainframes invented noSQL databases before SQL was a thing

I'm not sure about this; structured storage was popular before Unix made flat files common, but there was a fundamental flaw in how it was implemented: it was all in the kernel, not on top of it.

Who said anything about z/OS? There are other mainframes to chose from.

In any case, in what concerns "modern" Web development, z/OS has you covered,

https://www.ibm.com/products/open-enterprise-sdk-go-zos

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/java-sdk-products-zos

https://www.ibm.com/products/sdk-nodejs-compiler-zos

What mainframes are still alive, apart from z/Architecture?

As for "modern Web development" - not really; it's a bit like running Apache and MySQL on Windows 98 - yes, you technically could, but you probably don't want to. Have you heard of anyone wilfully choosing to use mainframes instead of some Unix over the past two decades?

IBM i, Unisy ClearPath and OS/2200, related offerings, now you can feel pedantic and differentiate which of them are proper mainframes, which are mini, microcomputers or whatever.

We are discussing technicalities here, the whole point started about Linux isn't the only way to have access to such called "modern" Web tools.

Technically they exist in any UNIX environment, mainframes (or whatever you feel like calling them), and Windows.

Missing stuff like fork () doesn't even matter for most of those runtimes. https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/fall2016/atlidakis

>IBM i, Unisys ClearPath and OS/2200

Once again, have you seen anyone technical wilfully choosing any of those for web stuff over the past two decades?

Wilfully or not, they offer such capabilities in 2022, and there are people paying for their use, probably many more people than some obscure UNIX clones that still exist out there.

And again, this whole thread started with what is possible outside Linux, and apparently I touched a nerve with you, apparently related to your FreeBSD role, let it go.

FreeBSD, IBM i, Unisys ClearPath and OS/2200, or flavour of the month UNIX clone, are all miles behind Linux distributions for Web development on compute centers, if you insist in counting ammo.

So better spend your contribution time in more productive discussions.

The thread started with what's possible outside Linux, but I don't think that to majority of people that means systems that exist purely for backwards compatibility. And I'm pretty sure that's the main - or perhaps the only major - reason anybody is still paying for "i" and OS/2200.

And no, neither FreeBSD nor MacOS are "miles behind Linux"; in fact all the same pieces of ecosystem are available in all of them.

You can run Spring with Java 17 in FreeBSD without problems. Same with Node.js, Postgres and MongoDB for example. About Mono, I don’t have experience with this environment. But I’m using the other technologies at my work without problems.

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