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Comment by renox | Hacker News Reader

Bah, this justification is flawed and/or obsolete: why does it matter for reusing the Linux kernel what classic GNU/Linux distribution do? It didn't prevent Google (Android) reusing the Linux kernel to build the Android OS..

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For doing what Haiku and BeOS excel at, you need a huge pile of patches to the Linux kernel, to rewrite even more subsystems than Android did -- for one, the audio subsystem in Linux is an absolute disaster, and have the impedance mismatch of your kernel not being written with neither the same philosophy nor language as the rest of the OS. Haiku wants to be backward compatible with programs written for BeOS, so you'd have to write a mish-mash of compatibility drivers for that to work. At a point, it becomes easier to just write your own kernel.

I think you can get by with either/or, although as some have recently pointed out, an empty Android project is 38 mb large with 1000+ files [1].

I think there is probably something to an elegant, small system. In theory, it should be easier to learn, more predictable, and more stable. Even if this is just on the developer end, it should translate to a less buggy, faster, more consistent user experience, or faster turn-around time for features. In theory, at least :)

[1] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/771749108780523520

Right, but consider the reason that an empty Android project is 38mb large with 1000+ files. How much does it have to do with the fact that Android uses the Linux kernel? I was under the impression that the (hand-wavy, two-second) explanation for that was "Java nonsense", not "Linux nonsense".

Good point :)

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