logoalt Hacker News

pjmlptoday at 6:32 AM2 repliesview on HN

Besides the sibling Biscuit, maybe because no one bothered to do it?

As simple as that, not everyone of us is a Linus.

I should also point out that if you are using a Mac, changes are its iBoot Safe C might already been replaced by Embedded Swift, a GC enabled systems language.

Chapter 5 of The Garbage Collection Handbook, or A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection paper for the incoming replies related to RC.

People care about UNIX clones because they are lazy, UNIX has the source code available, and an existing ecosystem that they don't want to replicate, so it always ends up being yet another clone, thus throwing away all the possible innovations.

We see this happening even with Haiku, Genode, Redox OS, or Windows now shipping alongside Linux on top of Hyper-V.

Unless one is an Apple or Google, with the money and will power to push something out the door, using Objective-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin, with plain C and C++ standard libraries, and even then people will bend backwards to put UNIX into those systems, even when the platform owners went to great effort to hide it under the official userspace APIs.


Replies

loup-vaillanttoday at 10:46 AM

> As simple as that, not everyone of us is a Linus.

I’m pretty sure Linus could not have written Linux today. Too much hardware to support, too many drivers to write, before it’s remotely useful. Well, except perhaps on some specialised servers.

Yes, not everyone is Linus. Otherwise we’d be using GNU Hurd. But he also came at the right time.

bigfatkittentoday at 10:26 AM

> People care about UNIX clones because they are lazy, UNIX has the source code available, and an existing ecosystem that they don't want to replicate, so it always ends up being yet another clone, thus throwing away all the possible innovations.

Which is a real shame, because people thinking outside the UNIX clone box have come up with some incredibly innovative operating systems like Plan 9 and OS/400.