[Gllug] Re:SCO's Linux fight

[Ian Norton]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 11:17:24PM +0100, Nix wrote:
> On Fri, 30 May 2003, Christopher Hunter uttered the following:
> > It's amusing to note that they didn't try taking on Microshaft - much of the 
> > guts of NT4 was an almost direct lift from UNIX
> 
> That's a very strange claim. The inside of NT is not remotely Unixlike
> (well, except for the POSIX subsystem of course, and even that is only
> Unixlike on the surface).
> 
> It has more similarities to VMS than to Unix from an architectural and
> design-decisions POV, and not all that terribly many to either.

If memory serves (which it may well not) alot of the first versions of the NT
kernels were largly written by a former developer of one of the early BSD
projects, some may feel that bits of old nt are kind of like bits of unices but
it really is a different animal, if linux is monolithic nt is a megalith, huge
amounts are lumped into the kernel that have very little to do with what a
kernel should really do and other stuff that should really be inside it can be
found lurking in dribbler space along with stuff like solitare, 

remember, in unix, everything is a file, in nt everything is just big :-)
 
> >                                         - the bits that weren't were 
> > cobbled together in a variety of languages (which goes a long way to 
> > explaining all the M$ OS's lack of stability).

well, its not designed to be stable, its designed to make you spend money on 
employing windows techies and to steal your details and send them to spammers 
and junk mail groups, ;-)

> I can't see how using many languages implies instability. A running
> Linux box likely has critical components written in C, C++, Perl, M4,
> awk, Python, and at least one Lisp-like `little language' (RTL); at the
> very least, while building it would have used things written in all of
> these.

yep, kernel modules are often written in assembly and c or c++, perl is nice,
ive never noticed it outright just barf though, it seems quite solid :-) 

> Little languages that fit the job well are a *good* thing, not some kind
> of sign of failure and fragmentation

its worth noting that anything even vaguely like the stuff we all take for
granted like shell scripting, perl/lisp etc are virtually alien to the world of
windows and NT, anything there now has just been ported over and unless you use
cygnus they are never as tightly integrated to the OS as a whole as you get on
a *nix,

wasnt that fun :-)

Ian


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