On Sat, Nov 06, 1999 at 02:26:03AM +0200, Shaul Karl wrote:
> > Linux 2.0 1998 229
> >
> > The Windows platform with 3433 API calls (up to NT4 SP3) belongs to a
> > different league; the associated problems are documented elsewhere [2].
>
> Is it fair to count all the Windows API calls and omit Linux GUI calls ?
> I wonder what is the figure for Linux if I would take into account the Xwindows
>interface and/or various libraries that meant to hide it. And what about the various
>window managers ?
This figure is misleading anyway. Pure Unix has 5 system calls - open(),
read(), write(), close() and fcntl(). And fcntl() hides 700 different
things.
I could rewrite Linux to use 1 system call, with fairly minimal
changes to the kernel and the C library, and be quite happy with the result.
What would that mean? I still have all the complexity moved one level below,
and one level above (the C library has to do more work, and the kernel has
to do more work) - that's all.
To measure the complexity of a system, you probably need to compare
mechanisms, not entry points.
Nimrod
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