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> There are tons of programs that do not go through "the" libc under Linux I agree with you there. This is a big problem with using the classic environment subsystem model. > Plus you still want all the fine semantics of Linux (mmap, cow or at least cow-like, etc.) and for tons of calls the libc is a trivial layer anyway, so you are not gaining much. One potential advantage to the environment subsystem model – it might have pushed them to enhance the NT API to be closer in feature parity to the Linux API, which could then have benefited Win32. > I doubt they would have been able to follow the upstream quickly enough, at least not without a pretty big dedicated team, and it seems difficult to justify. Well, one relevant difference is that Linux is much more of a moving target than POSIX or OS/2 are. POSIX is a formal standard, and changes in formal standards are slow, they take years. Back in the 1990s, OS/2 was a moving target, with IBM coming out with new versions with new features (2.x, 3.x, 4.x). But, Microsoft had decided they only wanted to support OS/2 1.x, and to ignore all new features in OS/2 2.x and higher, which made Microsoft's task much simpler. And even back when IBM was actively developing OS/2, they couldn't attain anywhere near the pace of change which is happening with Linux. Linux has far more people working on it than IBM ever had working on OS/2; and IBM, certainly back then (I don't know whether it is still true today), was notorious for slow, cumbersome and overly bureaucratic development practices, which was another limit on OS/2's velocity. |