[zer00eyz]

SABRE, is a reminder that things that are well designed just work.

How many banks and ERP's, how many accounting systems are still running COBOL scripts? (A lot).

Think about modern web infrastructure and how we deploy...

cpu -> hypervisor -> vm -> container -> run time -> library code -> your code

Do we really need to stack all these turtles (abstractions) just to get instructions to a CPU?

Every one of those layers has offshoots to other abstractions, tools and functionality that only adds to the complexity and convolution. Languages like Rust and Go compiling down to an executable are a step, revisiting how we deploy (the container layer) is probably on the table next... The use case for "serverless" is there (and edge compute), but the costs are still backwards because the software hasn't caught up yet.

[Muromec]

I used to work on a project that interfaced with both SABRE and Amadeus and "just works" isn't how I would describe it. The thing is also quite slow and annoying, as it's interface is optimized for the trained operator to use it in a terminal setting and not for us poor shcmucks calling it through some weird API bolted on top.

Also, try to retrieve a PNR on an airline website or do like anything on the airline's own website -- the UX is usually pretty bad and the data loading takes forever. For that too the GDS is to blame.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Library code - This is necessary because some things are best done correctly, just once, and then reused. I am not going to write my own date/time handling code. Or crypto. Or image codecs.

Run time - This makes development faster. Python, Lua, and Node.js projects can typically test out small changes locally faster than Rust and C++ can recompile. (I say this as a pro Rust user - The link step is so damned slow.)

Container - This gives you a virtual instance of "apt-get". System package managers can't change, so we abstract over them and reuse working code to fit a new need. I am this very second building something in Docker that would trash my host system if I tried to install the dependencies. It's software that worked great on Ubuntu 22.04, but now I'm on Debian from 2026. Here I am reusing code that works, right?

VM - Containers aren't a security sandbox. VMs allow multiple tenants to share hardware with relative safety. I didn't panic when the Spectre hacks came out - The cloud hosts handled it at their level. Without VMs, everyone would have to run their own dedicated hardware? Would I be buying a dedicated CPU core for my proof-of-concept app? VMs are the software equivalent of the electrical grid - Instead of everyone over-provisioning with the biggest generator they might ever need, everyone shares every power station. When a transmission line drops, the lights flicker and stay on. It's awe-inspiring once you realize how much work goes into, and how much convenience comes out of, that half-second blip when you _almost_ lose power but don't.

Hypervisor - A hypervisor just manages the VMs, right?

Come on. Don't walk gaily up to fences. Most of it's here for a reason.

[zer00eyz]

> Most of it's here for a reason.

Your argument for host os, virtual os, container is the very point im making. Rather than solve for security and installablity, we built more tooling, more layers of abstraction. Each have overhead, security surface and complexity.

Rather than solve Rusts performance (at build time), switch to a language that is faster but has more overhead, more security surface, more complexity.

You have broken down the stack of turtles that we have built to avoid solving the problem, at the base level...

SABRE, what the article is discussing, is the polar opposite of this, it gives us a hint that more layers of abstraction arent always the path to solutions.

[ForOldHack]

There are shops, I know of that run a java emulator of a GE Mainframe running... Multics. Someone told me that, and I was floored. Multics.

[noAnswer]

If you poke it a little you will eventually get Java exceptions. Because the AI article is lying. It is not 60 year old code running on unchanged bare metal. Things got reimplemented over time.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Nowhere does TFA claim that SABRE or Amadeus or other similar systems are using 60 year old code.

[dijksterhuis]

while we can learn from the past, we probably shouldn't look at it through sunglasses that are rose-tinted ;)

---

sabre, the company that owns and builds the current version of the system SABRE used by major companies today, uses all of those things the parent and you mentioned

> Google Cloud-native infrastructure that is scalable and secure. Microservice-enabled architecture that supports modularity. API-first approach for an open platform. [0]

> We rebuilt Sabre from the ground up: cloud-native technology, AI baked into the foundation, one goal in mind. Your success. [1]

yeah ... it's 'ai powered' now.

[0]: https://www.sabre.com/resources/viewpoints/offer-order-strat... (skip to the 'different by design' heading)

[1]: https://www.sabre.com/about/

---

> Do we really need to stack all these turtles (abstractions) just to get instructions to a CPU?

no. but those abstractions are there for things like scaling, reliability, redundancy, flexibility, ... and a bunch of other things not related to solely getting some instructions to a CPU. the number of turtles has increased because customers have more requirements for software today than they used to have in the 1960s.

sometimes we need the simplest solution with fewest dependencies. sometimes we need lots of turtles... it really depends on the problem in front of us.