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by linguae
34 days ago
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Rob Pike of Plan 9 and Go fame lamented this back in 2000 in his “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant” talk: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf I’d love to see a new operating system that explores radically different APIs for applications. The trouble is writing an operating system is a large effort. Barring market effects, OS has to be heads-and-shoulders better than existing ones in order to convince application developers to write software for it. Windows, macOS, and Linux are good enough for most people, even techies. Additionally, it is often easier to modify an existing operating system such as Linux than to go through the trouble of writing a brand new operating system. |
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Linux/BSD have massive hardware support, where a new OS needs to start from scratch. The same is true of software support: a new OS that truly has new primitives either adds a POSIX layer (and all POSIX-like software can't benefit from many of its improvements).
Even once you get past hardware and software support (both herculean tasks) performance needs years of hard work to be comparable to mainstream OSs.
And don't even get me started on the ever-growing complexity in standard protocols: HTTP2/3? QUIC? TLS? All "doable", but also huge sinks for time and effort when you already have a huge list of things to deal with.