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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Talk about things I’d want to bring back if I were suddenly a mega millionaire or billionaire.

You really wouldn't. I developed code for Coherent, if anyone remembers that UNIX clone. I honestly never want that to come back.

You should chime in on this Coherent (nascent) thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38594866

I dont suppose you have coherent 8086/80286 at all? I should have ordered it as a kid but I'd been told so many times to never trust mailorder. It still bugs me I didn't send in the $99.99

We had it on 286, but most of where I lived was on the 68k. I never bought a personal license. We had a license w/ source. I had an Amiga at home back in those days.

I'd go for a full-fledged BSD subsystem, myself. From what he wrote on the blog it sounds like this would be a pain in the butt to use for anything substantial.

This is where we should be, native support of Linux on Windows and native support of Windows on Linux. Executables should be cross-compatible, we somehow ended up in a reality of monopolistic -- 1v1. I would enjoy it to break free at some point but I doubt it.

Just about everything now is it's own garden with a tiny API gate to allow you access to the minor features of the whole collection.

I am aware of WSL and the likes but, it's taken many years to get that far.

> Executables should be cross-compatible

So cosmopolitan? https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

As mentioned in a thread yesterday (and justifiably memed often in general)[1], Win32 is the most stable environment to target in Linux.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585729

But they should all break on MacOS and refuse to be cross-compiled for Windows/Linux?

I agree with your idealism, but I think the best we're going to get is more or less what we have now, otherwise we end up in the space where program x works with o/s y version z subsystem q, but not the other combinations you'd hope for.

I'm still annoyed that we don't design enough for the future that when a new O/S version/architecture gets released there isn't more effort to save the past. We have a perfectly serviceable relatively recent printer (4-5 years old?) that my wife now can't use because her new Mac which replaced her 12 year old mac, now doesn't have a driver for it, because there are no Sonoma versions of it.

I think we err on the wrong side of creating waste at the expense of not doing (admittedly annoying) work.

To get back on topic, this was the point of subsytems - you managed to hold onto and get access to the past you liked from within your walled garden.

Extra annoying as Apple's ability to share a printer was so cool. I'm holding our TV Mac Mini to Mojave to keep compatibility w an older and an even older scanner. Oh and Turbo Tax went backward after only being the new version of Mac OS they went back to Mojave and two previous versions that they will run under.

No. What should be is that everything is open source and proptietary code is illegal.

I was able to cross compile from windows to BOW

https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/12/12/cross-compiling-to-bsd-o...

Doesn’t this sort of exist today with Cygwin/MSYS2/Git Bash/etc?

not really, the exe's are a.out so it's more like EMX. It's broken up like services more like HURD, and extended to 32bit on Win16.

It's far more cooler being able to run on Windows 3.1

Sure, but from a user perspective? It says you could run vi/gcc/etc. in BoW, which you can easily do. I don't know why GGP would want to spend millions (surely would cost way more than millions) nor billions recreating something that already exists?

Really, to do something different and that might move the needle to new possibilities. The *BSDs and Linux seem like they permanently miss just a few core elements to be mass adoptable. Mass adoption would benefit everyone through things like competition but also just different features. Like imagine being able to zfs send incremental backups of your daily drivers and gaming boxes. Or if plan9 had really taken off and had real market share. Idk, just feels like we've been stuck in a place for the last few decades.

You are using plan9's UTF8 and 9p in lots of products.

You're looking too close to the trees gcc/vi instead of the BSD forest.

BOW's only weakness is its single user mode, more so a limitation of being a Win16. If it'd been pushed harder to a NT service/client/server DLL it'd have been a much bigger player.

It's all moot, Pink/taligent died, Virtual Machines is where everyone runs their stuff these days, OS/2 had the driver/disk/filesystem stuff done right.

I think cygwin has been around for 30 years now

Totally.

I don't want to derail the conversation too much but when I look at what Notch has become since he became a billionaire it's frankly pathetic.

Princes & Kings

Isn't it strange how princes and kings, and clowns that caper in sawdust rings, and common people, like you and me, are builders for eternity?

Each is given a list of rules; a shapeless mass; a bag of tools. And each must fashion, ere life is flown, A stumbling block, or a Stepping-Stone. ― R. Lee Sharpe

What happened to Notch?

Nothing special, I think that’s what he/she meant.

I assume his tendency to say things that upset a particularly sensitive political milieu, but I can't say that's what they meant for certain.

Is that really how you interpreted my comment?

My critique of Notch is that he doesn't do cool stuff anymore.

Stuff like that weird space game that he was talking about making, or something like BSD on windows.

Ah OK. I guess I interpreted it differently because I don't follow him as a person. So my exposure to him is usually people complaining about something he said, or someone saying what he said was based. I know very little of his projects after Minecraft, so I just used the info I have.

I dunno why you'd be sore about it, the guy already paid his dues? Again though, bot familiar eith what he goes around promising.

Bit down on about every right wing conspiracy theory you can come up with.

Bought a big house on the Hills, throws big parties with superficial people, tweets shit as if the political opinions of an instant billionaire suddenly mattered.

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