Linked by bcavally on Mon 21st Dec 2009 17:18 UTC
Today there are many operating systems available. Every vendor or community round it tries to make it as good as possible. Having different goals, different legacy and different cultures, they succeed in it more or less. We (end users) end up with big selection of operating systems, but for us the operating systems are usually compromise of the features that we would like to have. So is there an operating system that would fit all the needs of the end user? Is is the BeOS clone Haiku?
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RE[5]: Legacy architecture == bad?
by cerbie on Tue 22nd Dec 2009 06:39
in reply to "RE[4]: Legacy architecture == bad?"
Member since:2006-01-02
What about uClibc? Hey, code even I can figure out, most of the time! But, practically every piece of FOSS software is compatible with GNU's entire build chain and library system. You don't throw that away for a little added responsiveness and space saving, usually.
As I said, there are reasons for choosing to have various complications added to the system. There are always trade-offs involved.
As far as Xorg/Xfree, there have many failed attempts to replace it, several of which would be far superior (Wayland, FI), but politics get in the way. I don't care if it's modular. I care if it applies vsync properly, and is not prone to allowing applications to crash everything that uses it. Xorg does neither. Attempts to work around the issues get sidelined. projects to replace it don't get the support needed to grow.
It's not like extra features (including backwards-compatibility) are going to destroy the world. Just that they may sometimes inhibit a smaller number of programmers from effectively pulling off a task when trying to use a system ingrained with them, because there is always one extra little thing you might not have thought about getting in your way. In many cases, all that legacy kruft can make things easier, such as porting software between OSes, and building custom derivatives of OSes (DD-WRT and the like come to mind, for Linux).
Edited 2009-12-22 06:57 UTC
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
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Member since:
2007-11-04
About GNU C and CPP libraries being confusing layers of complexity. Every system which is programmed in C needs a C library. AFAIK pretty much any OS today will include a C library, so this does not make Unix any more complex than any other system. POSIX compliance: well you have to implement some sort of standard so programs no what they can rely on for filesystem operations etc.. You can use POSIX, W32 or implement a new one which will probably look very similar, still does not make one system more complex than the other. Same thing with Xorg, you need some sort of display server no matter what. You can tightly integrate it with the rest of the system (which I think is what Windows does), or make it more modular (e.g. X).
BTW Haiku atm uses both Gnu libc and tries to be POSIX compliant AFAIK.
Likewise, with C as an example, just having old roots does not make something complex. C has grown with the times, and in a highly disciplined manner.