Comment by ansible | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ansible | Hacker News Reader

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As for the point about how nobody is working on replacements, that's wrong. There's (partial) replacements for most coreutils written in rust, and a whole kernel has been under active development for years now.

I acknowledge the strong pull to go and re-implement existing standards like POSIX in a new language like Rust.

But, having had to again deal with all the corner cases of signal handling and threads for a Linux application, I encourage any prospective Rust OS developers to pick a different path.

Please, please, let's move beyond POSIX. Give me a sane set of operating system API calls that work in a reasonable way together. And that can compose easily.

So that future developers don't have to deal with file read calls that may (or may not) be interrupted by a signal, and all that.

I find your post quite funny in the context of the topic..

I totally respect (and have donated to) the OpenBSD project, and ran it for years for my firewall machines. Though these days I'm running containerized Linux firewalls for ease of upgrades. Anyway...

I do understand OBSD's objections to using a new implementation language for their core utilities. And I understand their philosophy for what they're doing and how they're doing it in the general case.

But the fact remains that POSIX, as it has evolved (or not, in some cases) makes writing correct programs harder than necessary. Especially modern multi-threaded programs.

I'd like to see something better and simpler. And maybe written in something other than C.

Were there any successful attempts to design a brand new and complete OS API in the last decade?

UWP, slow and steady, will eventually get there.

ChromeOS, the OS APIs are the web platform.

iOS, almost everything that matters is done via Cocoa

Android, Java reigns. There is very little UNIX exposed to userspace, less so since Google started clamping down NDK since version 7.

Not really, but POSIX itself is almost 30 years old (and primarily standardized interfaces that were considerably older), and a lot of interesting stuff happened ca. 1995-2005. See e.g. BeOS or Inferno.

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