Seeking a Development Environment (Sun?)

['da Kingfish]

In article <935 at kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP> barnettb at steinmetz.UUCP (Barnett Bruce G) writes:
>In article <4254 at brl-smoke.ARPA> giebelhaus at umn-cs.arpa writes:

[Giebelhaus has reasons why he likes Apollos, Barnett why he likes Suns.]

I am an Apollo user, having chosen Apollo over Sun and Dec.  I find the
Apollo kernel to be different than the traditional Unix kernel, and by
and large better.  And, executable images for Apollos are different
than a.outs.  And there is no /dev/kmem.  (Although I think that is
definitely a step in the right direction ... i.e., the 1980s.)

Those differences loom large in some people's minds.  It did take me 
a while to get up to speed on Apollos.  Without exchanging nitpicks
(Apollo has A, Sun doesn't, and vice versa) I can say this much:

There hasn't been a program we have tried to port from a Vax to an
Apollo that hasn't made it (we like to have our local mods on the
Apollos as well as Vax and Sun).  Some are pretty easy, like sendmail and
uucp.  Others take more time, like X (and I am pretty sure NFS runs on
Apollos).  Problems that crop up reflect non-portable code, and suspect
programming practice, much more than Apollo problems.  When we have
discovered a real problem, like a bug, or unacceptable performance,
Apollo has always fixed it.

The stuff I do is pretty much non-graphics oriented, so I can't
speak to that, one way or the other.

The idea that Apollo's Unix is an "emulation" or a "layered product"
(like Eunice, for example) is really getting to be tiresome, and is a
canard.  It is layered in the same way that there is a Unix that people
see layered on top of a Unix kernel.  As I mentioned above, they do
have a different kernel, with their own OS interface.  That can be
risky to do, when other vendors trade on the safety of adherence to the
beliefs of the past, and other signs of orthodoxy, like /dev/kmem.

Apollo does "hide" some internals, in that you can't grope through kmem.
Sometimes information hiding is OK, and in some contexts that is considered
to be desireable.

Sun has been very innovative, no doubt about it, and so has Apollo.
And, I guess there are some Apollo things that bug me, nobody's
perfect.  (And canfieldtool is my kind of application -:))

>	It has been a year since I have last used an Apollo ...
I guess so.
>	But I feel that the difference in the companies
>	is primarily in attitude. And I don't like Apollo's attitude.
s/Apollo/Sun/, but that just goes to show you, there's no accounting for
taste.


--paul

paul at umix.cc.umich.edu
...ihnp4!umich!paul

(oops, I almost forgot ... these are my own opinions, and it usually costs
a beer to get them!)