On Friday 16 April 2010 21:29:44 lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote: > > Messy, with high levels of noise-to-signal - certainly... but absolutely, > > astoundingly productive and in constant motion. > > In my opinion, most of the output from the Posix developers is trash. > It's the equivalent of a cancer, polluting the body with poisons. > Somewhere in the mix there will certainly be something of value, but > it is well hidden by the bulk of the production. The few jewels are > also corrupted by the manner in which they need to be delivered, > namely the autoconf stuff. >
Understood. Though I don't share your opinion quite to the degree that you expressed. Additionally, I have no desire to debate subjective perspectives of the overall net usefulness of POSIX, let alone autoconf - everyone, of course, has their opinions and experiences, favorable or otherwise. > If you consider things more objectively you will also acknowledge that > very little new is being created, but rather many old things are being > "improved" upon (regurgitated) in manners that consume more and more > computing cycles and deliver less and less performance. > Again, I'd prefer to not to debate the ratio of good software vs. trashy software, or to debate what's new and useful vs. merely regurgitated and worsened. Though it's certainly a perfectly interesting topic. > Consider further the following: porting GCC/G++ to a new platform > rather than Linux is almost inconceivable, porting more and more Linux > software to a compiler suite other than GCC/G++ is equally > inconceivable. If you can't see anything wrong with GCC's bloat, the > dead end it leads to, there is little reason to argue with you. > Finally, regarding this mention of gcc - the "Plan X" in my mind's eye would far prefer LLVM/Clang to gcc, for precisely the reasons you point out. (I've been considering the prospect of implementing a kencc dialect for the clang c front-end). (I'm using "Plan X" in the sense I mentioned in the original post - i.e. I'm _not_ suggesting that the official releases of Plan 9 proper should introduce the platform changes under discussion. "Plan X" means: any alternative expression of the Plan 9 operating system. Also, I'm using the phrase "my mind's eye", in order to stress that this is all just speculative, science-fiction) Regarding the POSIX situation - a "Plan X" of my mind's eye is not concerned with fighting that particular battle. The basic wild-eyed premise, is that an alternative Plan 9 distribution which "features" a native, more "POSIXy" approximation than APE, in addition to a native compiler that supported a larger number of languages and C dialects than 9c - would lead to a much more broadly comfortable environment for a greater number of general developers and users. The theory, is that the Plan 9 implementations of the following concepts: * 9P * mutable namespaces * union directories * ubiquitous fileservers * transparent distributed services * etc ... are simply - by far - much more important and practical to a greater number of people than these other prominent Plan 9 idioms: * radical frugal simplicity throughout the entire system * a stance against POSIX and other standards * a stance against alternate programming language paradigms * a strong bias towards a particular form of user interaction with the system (i.e. acme, rio, etc) Peace
