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by Sirened 1498 days ago
Always love hobby operating systems which leave UNIX and POSIX behind. It's really a shame that we're slowly converging on POSIX being the basis of _all_ operating systems since it forces some bizarre and undesirable design decisions [1]. Dropping POSIX and building something new gives us a chance to actually explore novel ideas in operating systems design.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/0...
4 comments
conradev 1497 days ago
Fuchsia is not a hobby operating system (it is deployed to production by Google) and it kinda leaves POSIX behind, which I find cool

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/d4f9b980f18fc6722b06...

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pjmlp 1497 days ago
Depends where you look.

The cloud OSes have long left classical UNIX behind, Kubernetes or managed languages on top of type 1 hypervisors are the name of the game, even if there is some POSIX based kernel somewhere on the stack.

On the mobile side, although Android and iOS have some POSIX support, it hardly matters for app development.

Even on macOS, which is a certified UNIX, if you want access to some of the modern networking APIs, they are only exposed at Objective-C level.

So while POSIX kind of has won, long term it has been yet another phase in the history of computing, thus looking forward to such alternatives.

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conradev 1497 days ago
All of these things are ultimately abstractions built on top of POSIX (aside from actual unikernels which can be used in the virtualization scenario)

It absolutely does free OS designers to remove the POSIX parts from in between, but no one really has yet

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pjmlp 1497 days ago
There is no POSIX on many type 1 hypervisors, specially stuff like Hyper-V.

Android and ChromeOS developers also don't have any access to any kind of POSIX abstractions or APIs.

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mike_hock 1497 days ago
> In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long outlived its usefulness and is now a liability.

Based.

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mahkoh 1497 days ago
Any paper that proposes to remove functionality without attempting to steelman said functionality can safely be disregarded.
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