Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 25th Jun 2007 20:30 UTC, submitted by Nitsudima
OSNews, Generic OSes "The Free Software community is well known for its diversity. This is most obvious at the application level, but even exists in the context of operating systems. David Chisnall takes a break from UNIX-derivatives and explores some of the more esoteric options." Note: From experience, I can say that the author's claim that "Haiku is more or less ready for their 1.0 release in terms of features" is a bit overambitious.
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UNIX-likes boring?
by BSDfan on Mon 25th Jun 2007 21:07 UTC
BSDfan
Member since:
2007-03-14

I don't like this "David Chisnall" very much.. lol!

What's funny is BeOS itself has "decent" POSIX/SUS compliance, Allowing *nix applications to be ported without "much" trouble..

Unfortunately, Haiku still uses an early GCC 2x release to avoid breaking compatibility with BeOS R5, I hear by R2 they will finally go to GCC 4x.. So all is well and good ;)

Reply Score: 1

RE: UNIX-likes boring?
by Almafeta on Mon 25th Jun 2007 21:21 in reply to "UNIX-likes boring?"
Almafeta Member since:
2007-02-22

Just having POSIX compatibility doesn't make it a *nix... even Windows has had POSIX compatibility since Windows 2000 (I think, maybe a bit earlier).

The POSIX standard seems to unite a large number of disparate operating systems. However, just implementing a feature doesn't define an operating system.

Regarding the article itself, my only complaint is that I didn't learn about a single OS new to me. Most of these are fairly old projects.

Edited 2007-06-25 21:25

Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[2]: UNIX-likes boring?
by Morgan on Tue 26th Jun 2007 00:02 in reply to "RE: UNIX-likes boring?"
Morgan Member since:
2005-06-29

Well, there is a difference between having POSIX compatibility (Windows) and being POSIX-compliant (BeOS, QNX, most other UNIX-y OSes). I'm no programmer, but I know that most of the stuff ported to BeOS that ran fine natively would require a compatibility layer like Cygwin to work in Windows, if it would even run at all.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[2]: UNIX-likes boring?
by John Nilsson on Tue 26th Jun 2007 02:36 in reply to "RE: UNIX-likes boring?"
John Nilsson Member since:
2005-07-06
RE[2]: UNIX-likes boring?
by jessta on Tue 26th Jun 2007 05:09 in reply to "RE: UNIX-likes boring?"
jessta Member since:
2005-08-17

Regarding the article itself, my only complaint is that I didn't learn about a single OS new to me. Most of these are fairly old projects.


That's probably because you read OSnews.

Reply Parent Score: 5

RE: UNIX-likes boring?
by viton on Tue 26th Jun 2007 13:54 in reply to "UNIX-likes boring?"
viton Member since:
2005-08-09

Haiku still uses an early GCC 2x release to avoid breaking compatibility with BeOS R5

Problems caused by GCC guys, because they changed the virtual call interface
and name mangling in version 3. In version 4 compatibility was broken again, at least for Sparc.
So, for people from real world, they made impossible to upgrade.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[2]: UNIX-likes boring?
by Vanders on Tue 26th Jun 2007 14:07 in reply to "RE: UNIX-likes boring?"
Vanders Member since:
2005-07-06

The ABI was changed to comply with the cross-vendor C++ ABI. It wasn't like the GCC guys sat down one day and said "Hey you know what, let's change the C++ ABI for the hell of it. That'll really annoy everyone!"

Reply Parent Score: 4