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Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

That is far, far more than transferring a byte of data. It's not the future though of course, this was well established in the 80s, it just so happens that it's a decent model for managing remote machines that outlasted over-engineered distributed designs like Plan9, VMS, MOSIX, etc. It's much more meaningful and useful than "something simple" "running little functions floating in the void" which just sounds like some vapid marketing pitch.

The great thing about Linux as the base layer is that it allows a commodity common ground with a very capable system that also facilitates more specialized layers to be implemented on top of it.

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> The great thing about Linux as the base layer is that it allows a commodity common ground with a very capable system that also facilitates more specialized layers to be implemented on top of it.

The great thing about x86 instruction set as the base layer is that it allows a commodity common ground with a very capable system that also facilitates more specialized layers to be implemented on top of it. Only a handful of programmers develop at a layer below the x86 instruction set, or even at that level for that matter.

We have to get our heads out of that mire.

Well, arm and mips exist, are are no less capable than x86. And most apps don't really care which ISA they use. So that point is false.

Now, what is that about alternate OS systems which can still do everything that Linux can, including handling network or service outages?

(*well, there are BSDs, but I don't think thats what you had in mind)

My point is that the instruction set of these large CPUs (not AVRs etc) is itself just an abstraction to an inscrutable micromachine. That abstraction lets you develop a complex program without knowing the details.

Unix was specifically designed for small, resource starved machines and did not have the powerful abstractions of mainframe OSes like Multics or OS/360. It's OK, but as modern CPUs and IO systems have grown and embraced the mainframe paradigms that had been omitted from the minicomputers (e.g. memory management, channel controllers, DMA, networking etc) unix and linux have bolted on support that doesn't always fit its own fundamental assumptions.

That's fine, it's how evolution works, but "cloud computing" is a different paradigm, and 99.99999% of developers should not have to be thinking at a unix level any more than they think of the micromachine (itself a program running on a lower level instruction set) that is interpreting the compiler's output at runtime.

As I said in the other comment, maybe people though that "cloud computing" is a different paradigm back in the 70's but it turns out that no, it's all the same distributed stuff.

If you have two processes on same machine, locking a shared data structure takes microseconds. You can easily update hundreds of shared maps and still provide great performance to user.

If you have datacenters in NY and Frankfurt, the ping is 90mS and fundamental speed of light limit say it will never be below 40mS.

So "lock a shared data structure" is completely out of the question, you need a different consistency model, remote-aware algorithms, local caches, and so on.

There are people who are continuously trying to replace Unix with completely new paradigms, like Unison [0].. but it is not really catching up, and I don't think it ever will. Physics is tough.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652677

Poor analogy. You're welcome to address what I wrote directly if you'd like though.

It's quite an appropriate analogy. We used to write a lot of code in assembly code. I used to write microcode and even modified a CPU. But it's been decades since I last wrote microcode (much less modified an already installed CPU!) and now the instruction sets of MPUs like x86 and ARM are mostly just abstractions over a micromachine that few people think about.

And an OS it the same: it used to be quite common to write for the bare iron, to which an OS is by definition an abstractional interface. I still do that, but it's an arcane skill frankly not in huge demand. Which is probably a good thing.

Nowadays most code is written at nosebleed levels of abstraction, which frankly is a good thing, even if I don't like doing it myself. But still, as developers do it, they are often dragged back down the stack to a level that these days few understand.

I think the person/company that cracks this will be the dominant infrastructure play of the decade.

It's not an appropriate analogy because most people don't program in x86, but most people know (or can easily look up, when the need arises) basic Linux administration commands.

Are you advocating for more abstraction or less? As in a cloud without all the modern OS layers and cruft.

More abstraction

That is far, far more than transferring a byte of data.

Educate me.

It's much more meaningful and useful than "something simple" "running little functions floating in the void" which just sounds like some vapid marketing pitch.

That was a quick response to what I thought would be better than administrating a UNIX system on an Amazon machine. Don't be an ass. I've no experience with the real distributed computing systems created before UNIX.

The great thing about Linux as the base layer is that it allows a commodity common ground with a very capable system that also facilitates more specialized layers to be implemented on top of it.

No, that's the vapid marketing pitch. The Linux kernel randomly kills processes when it starts exhausting memory. It's garbage.

Hey, Brainfuck also facilitates more specialized layers to be implemented on top of it. Now, what's stupid about doing that, however?

> Educate me.

Not sure if I'm being trolled... It finds a remote machine by name, and routes a connection to it. It authenticates and establishes a secure connection with the machine. It sends a command to the remote machine, the remote machine executes it, and the result is returned. It then puts the result into a form that can be used programmatically by the local shell.

> That was a quick response to what I thought would be better than administrating a UNIX system on an Amazon machine.

It was content-free.

> Don't be an ass.

What's good for the goose...

> I've no experience with the real distributed computing systems created before UNIX.

And already the expert. Impressive.

> No, that's the vapid marketing pitch.

No, that's the reality. That's why Amazon, Google, Azure, and everybody else offer it in their clouds and use it on their internal infrastructure.

> The Linux kernel randomly kills processes when it starts exhausting memory. It's garbage.

I'll take that over "running little functions floating in the void", it actually exists and works.

I'm being trolled by someone who finds a DNS lookup and an encrypted TCP connection to send a textual command to another machine is somehow impressive, rather than entirely basic and, again, unimpressive.

It then puts the result into a form that can be used programmatically by the local shell.

That does sound better than returns one octet with two well-defined values, sure.

And already the expert. Impressive.

I know UNIX is shit with a legion of cultists.

Hey, if we live in the best of all possible worlds, explain the market dominance of Windows. Did MicroSoft give Windows away for nothing, to poor unsuspecting university students who decided to hack on it instead of learn what a real computer is, until none remained?

You seem quite unhinged for a self-proclaimed expert. Maybe it's time for a break from the internet.

It's easy to support the status quo, until someone points out numerous issues with it, I know.

At least read my website before calling me unhinged.

It's even easier to shit on the status quo without having anything better.

> At least read my website before calling me unhinged.

No. I've seen countless tech prophets peddling snake oil over the decades, and it's always the same. Everything is dumb, poorly versed in the state of the art and history, but this magical ill-thought-out thing will somehow solve everything. It's very boring and predictable.

> Educate me.

You forgot an entire direction of input and focused on just a return code.

> The Linux kernel randomly kills processes when it starts exhausting memory. It's garbage.

No it doesn’t. It’s not random and it’s configurable. Turn off overcommit if you want malloc to fail when memory runs out.

> No, that's the vapid marketing pitch. The Linux kernel randomly kills processes when it starts exhausting memory. It's garbage.

You sound like someone who wants some sort of magical fantasy abstraction level where errors never happen and you can just write code without ever caring about said errors or really anything that happens at a lower level or outside of your code. Sorry, but that doesn't exist and never will. Code runs on computers, it doesn't run in a "void".

> The Linux kernel randomly kills processes when it starts exhausting memory. It's garbage.

If you want to disable overallocation and the OOM killer, be my guest. You'll want to install some extra banks of RAM though.

Or is there a better way, provided by other OSes?

Sure, you push the failure into the processes, and most OSes I've used do this. Thus (to use unix terminology) sbrk and fork() fail and it's the program's responsibility to handle that, gracefully or not as it wishes. You also degrade more slowly via paging.

You shouldn't get to the point where a perfectly innocent process is killed to reclaim memory. A process can die, or even (in some cases) recover cleanly from running out of memory -- that should be the process's choice.

Which OSes have you used that do that?

In Linux you can do that -- disable overcommit (although I'm not sure if that's 100% foolproof). But that's often not preferred because that way does lead to "perfectly innocent" processes being killed: whoever allocates the next page when memory has run out loses. And how do they get to decide? What if a failure path requires paging in one more page of code from disk? Or causes a store to a COW page?

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