Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

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> The problem is that it's seriously hard to improve meaningfully on Unix.

From a more technical perspective, there are a number of things that Unix isn't great at. I'm confining myself here to commonalities between OSX (a BSD) and Linux, as I'm not an OS expert...

* characters for everything

* file abstraction doesn't really work 100% as an abstraction.

* based around C

* huge barrier between code and data.

* abysmal permissions model (read/write/execute/sticky/etc)... SELinux and facls slightly fix this, at the cost of UX.

* monolithic kernel

* interface designed for teletype machines, not graphic displays.

* textual interface mixes control and data planes

* limited APIs for threading/fibers/etc.

There is an old and somewhat out of date book called the Unix Haters Handbook. It's worth a read.

Plan 9 needs to be thought of as a "Unix evolution", not a different OS.

For a perspective on what would be different and possibly better, you will need to look at z/OS, Windows NT, QNX, L4, Wind River, Mac OS <= 9, Genera, and a few of the other more lesser known operating systems.

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook is both hilarious and insightful. Like you said, it's a bit out-of-date, but many of the complaints are still relevant.

That said, I'm guessing most of the authors of it are today running Unix-derived systems.

Fully agree.

I was impressed when I discovered z/OS uses a JIT based environment for all user space applications, in a way similar to what Microsoft was trying with Vista, or Google with Android, before the NDK came into the picture.

Having had contact with UNIX when Linux was just a thought for Linus, I surely think there are many more types of operating systems to explore.

UNIX is nice, but not the best of all.

Who knows how things would have turned out to be if Apple had gone BeOS instead of NextStep.

there is a paper for this: http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Fantastic, if for nothing other than Dennis Ritchie's "anti-foreword":

"Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy."

You should have mentioned OpenVMS (VAX/VMS), it was the biggest rival of Unix back in the DEC's glory days.

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