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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

Problem: We make a lot of CRUD apps.

Solution: The OS should do it.

Ehhh... Why is that the obvious solution? We can't decide on the right way to do it in user space, why does moving the problem to the OS help? This seems to be based on the whimsical idea that having the OS do it would somehow fix the varied problems of structured communication. Are we enforcing WSLDs in the OS? One size fits all structures defined by the OS? I don't think the rambling thoughts really made it back to the thesis.

That said, I suggest to anyone interested in this stuff to try Powershell...no really! I don't use it often but it is a window into another world where everything has a structured definition behind the text output.

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> Problem: We make a lot of CRUD apps. > Solution: The OS should do it. > > Ehhh... Why is that the obvious solution? We can't decide on the right way to do it in user space, why does moving the problem to the OS help?

The article is indeed ridiculous. An OS should not do everything. Hardware storage resources are generally the memory, disk, and network connection (and if you're getting really deep, the cache and registers). A good OS should only provide access to those resources as efficiently as possible across a wide variety of hardware.

There is a vast myriad of ways of utilizing those resources, and it would be a fools errand to implement a one-size-fits-all approach. The better approach is to provide access to the resources, and let higher level software developers build on top of them.

A disk only database is far different than a disk database with a memory cache, is far different than a memory only database, is far different than any collection of the above coordinated via a network connection. Further, storing text is different than storing images, which is different from storing video, which is different from storing JSON or XML.

Pushing everything to the OS will often give you worse performance, locks you into a single OS vendor, and slows down innovation from third parties. Bad idea.

> An OS should not do everything. Hardware storage resources are generally the memory, disk, and network connection (and if you're getting really deep, the cache and registers). A good OS should only provide access to those resources as efficiently as possible across a wide variety of hardware.

It sounds like you're talking about kernel only. So I guess your OS of choice is something like LFS?

My view of an operating system is very different; it's supposed to be a complete system ready for productive work as well as a programming environment and platform for additional third party software.

> Pushing everything to the OS will often give you worse performance, locks you into a single OS vendor, and slows down innovation from third parties. Bad idea.

Pushing everything to third parties will often give you massive duplication of effort and dependencies, excessively deep stacks that eat performance and make debugging harder, locks you into a clusterfuck of dependency hell, and slows innovation from first party because now they must be very sure not to break the huge stack of third party stuff that everyone critically depends on. There'll be no cohesion because third parties invent their own ways of doing things as the stripped-to-the-bones OS has no unified vision, documentation is going to be all over the place, there's nothing holding back churn... development of third party applications is slow and frustrating because the lowest common denominator (underlying OS) is basically magnetic needle. Bad idea.

This is largely why I prefer BSD over Linux, but I share the author's frustrations with Unix in general.

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