[TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

[Justin Coffey]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 10:22 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 12:11:08PM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> > And a bonus question, why, oh why, can't we have a contained kernel that
> > provides minimal functionality (dare I say microkernel), that is
> securable,
> > and layers above it that other stuff (everything else) can run on with
> > auditing and suchlike for traceability?
>
> I can answer the microkernel question I think.  It's discipline.
> The only microkernel I ever liked was QNX and I liked it because it was
> a MICROkernel.  The entire kernel easily fit in a 4K instruction cache.
>
> The only way that worked was discipline.  There were 3 guys who could
> touch the kernel, one of them, Dan Hildebrandt, was sort of a friend
> of mine, we could, and did, have conversations about the benefits of a
> monokernel vs a microkernel.  He agreed with me that QNX only worked
> because those 3 guys were really careful about what went into the
> kernel.  There was none of this "Oh, I measured performance and it is
> only 1.5% slower now" nonsense, that's death by a hundred paper cuts.
> Instead, every change came with before and after cache miss counts
> under a benchmark.  Stuff that increased the cache misses was heavily
> frowned upon.
>
> Most teams don't have that sort of discipline.  They say they do,
> they think they do, but when marketing says we have to do $WHATEVER,
> it goes in.
>

This describes pretty much every project I've ever worked on.  It starts
small, with a manageable feature set and a clean and performant codebase
and then succumbs to external pressure for features and slowly bloats.  If
the features prove useful then the project will live on of course (and
those features may well be the reason the project lives on), but at some
point the bloat and techdebt become the dominant development story.

My question then is, are there any examples of projects that maintained
discipline, focus and relevance over years/decades that serve as counter
examples to the above statement(s)?  OpenBSD?  Go?  Is there anything to
learn here?

-Justin
-- 
+1 (858) 230-1436
jqcoffey at gmail.com
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