[josephg]

> You realize the first databases were hierarchical, not relational, right?

Yes. Obviously, the first databases humanity ever made were also the worst databases humanity ever made. With the possible exception of mongodb.

The choices Linux made in 1980 made sense at the time. But 40 years is a long time! It is as you say - databases have improved a lot in that time. I don’t know if Linux built on top of a modern database would be better or worse. How could we know unless somebody tries it?

[midoridensha]

>How could we know unless somebody tries it?

Because the effort to build such a thing would be gargantuan. Think of all the work that went into the Linux kernel plus all the userspace programs and applications on top of it: you want to recreate all that effort because of a hunch?

I'm sure some people with more expertise in theoretical CS than me can tell you better why this is a bad idea, but consider we already have databases now, and different databases work better for different tasks than others. How is baking a database into your filesystem going to compete? What if you pick the wrong one? What if it sucks for certain use-cases that current systems (filesystem+DB) work better at?

Every time someone's tried getting better efficiency by baking things in at a low level, it hasn't worked out too well, because by forcing a standard that way, it prevents innovation (e.g., with your DB-as-filesystem, when everyone decides they want to work with JSON right in their DB, it can't be done with yours because it wasn't designed that way and it can't be bolted on because it'll break things, but with Postgres it's easy to add in).

[josephg]

Doing a lot of work on a hunch that it might be better is the basis of all science. And all progress in general. Building a fully verified operating system kernel was a massive amount of work - but the SeL4 team still did it because they thought it was a good idea and got funding. (And as I understand it, their OS gets a lot of use in things the baseband chips in cell phones).

Yes, making a new toy operating system is a lot of work. But we don’t need to reinvent all of the software that has been built on Linux to tell if its a promising idea. Just enough to learn and see if the juice is worth the squeeze. And maybe have a little fun along the way.

In general I think it’s really sad how little innovation there is now in the OS space, simply because of how dominant Linux is and how much work it takes to make something yourself. How many good ideas are waiting in the wings because it would take too much effort to try them out? What a pity!

[midoridensha]

>In general I think it’s really sad how little innovation there is now in the OS space, simply because of how dominant Linux is and how much work it takes to make something yourself. How many good ideas are waiting in the wings because it would take too much effort to try them out? What a pity!

People are coming up with all kinds of innovations in computing, just not so much in the OS space because it's considered a solved problem. There's tons of stuff going on at much higher levels, and has been for a long time: virtualization, containerization, microservices, etc. The low-level building blocks are "good enough" for the higher-order things people want to try out now.

We've seen this in many domains: once you have something that works well enough, it's hard to justify effort to optimize it more, when there's other problems to be solved.