Hacker News Reader

Comment by e3bc54b2 | Hacker News Reader

> Was there any reason for that?

Perfect is the enemy of good, and good enough is the perfect enemy of better.

Unix/Linux were/are good enough for vast majority of world's needs. So anything better is not worth the hassle.

Yep. *n*x is a victim of its own success. Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, et al built something so much better than most of the competition that it ate the world.

There have been better ideas since then (including Plan 9) but nothing able to knock *n*x off its perch.

IMO, LMI and Symbolics might have done it, if their offering hadn't required enormously expensive machines (by the standards of the time), while *n*x would run on cheap hardware (again, by the standards of the time).

Perhaps we'll eventually see an innovative OS written in WASM. That's about the only way I see to get around the vendor lock-in (I mean, even Microsoft appears to be converging on a "Windows UI wrapped around a *n*x kernel" model... Apple, of course, has been using a "Mac UI wrapped around a *n*x kernel" for a couple of decades now).

For anyone who hasn't read it, I recommend Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better" essay: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

(original essay and several followups at this link)

WSL is running on its own VM. Windows kernel still owns the game.

On "Cloud OS" the underlying kernel only matters for classical workloads being pushed onto the cloud.

Any language that doesn't depend on POSIX and has a rich library ecosystem, can happily run on top of type 1 hypervisors, which are in a way, the revenge of microkernels.

> Any language that doesn't depend on POSIX and has a rich library ecosystem, can happily run on top of type 1 hypervisors

That's interesting. Can you run for example Golang programs on ESXI? Go isn't exactly POSIX-free but it also doesn't need all of it.

Not on ESXI, but as unikernels, sure,

https://github.com/solo-io/unik

https://hermitcore.org/

https://github.com/icexin/eggos

https://nanovms.com/

"Pure Go Unikernels - go metal with TamaGo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOEl5BCfHv0

Awesome, thanks. Do you have a take on unikernels in general?

My main side project at the moment involves trying to use QEMU+WHPX on Windows to sandbox selfhosted services. Long term I think it would be awesome to support unikernels, but I get the feeling a lot of the momentum for them has died down the last couple years.

I work with NanoVMs and nanos.org can work under both qemu (by default) and deploy to hyper-v under WSL2. Also, nanos.org itself is a go unikernel so we have excellent go support.

Also, from parent comment, ops, can deploy to esxi/vsphere perfectly fine.

>Perhaps we'll eventually see an innovative OS written in WASM

I hope that doesn't happen. No body wants a Nuclear War and 40 million refugees off the coast of Australia.

>> No body wants a Nuclear War and 40 million refugees off the coast of Australia.

For thise wondering about this reference:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

I wouldn't say that Plan 9 has better (basic) ideas than Unix, it's more like a Unix that follows the old ideas even for new things. AFAIU many of the ugly aspects of "contemporary Unix" stem from the Unix wars and later additions by people with less design sense than the Bell Labs group.

Well, most of the world uses Windows (not a UNIX), macOS/iOS (owes more to NextSTEP than UNIX) and Android (owes more to BeOS than UNIX). The latter two use a UNIX kernel to get basics like scheduling and a filesystem but the userland APIs look nothing like UNIX or Linux, and both have a strong micro-kernelish vibe to them with Mach and the Binder respectively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com