Unix, Unixpeople, Usenix - from a non-compunerd's point of view...

[Boston Office]

In article <165 at aplvax.UUCP> ded at aplvax.UUCP (Don E. Davis) writes:
>In article <97 at tekadg.UUCP> davidl at tekadg.UUCP (Dave) writes:
>>
>>Unfortunately, despite its undesirability in other respects, there's
>>considerable incentive to use Unix due to its portability.  When an O.S. is
>>needed for a new system, Unix can be brought up quickly, since most of it is
>>written in C.  What gets overlooked by the naive management which allows the
>>thing into the company, of course, is that (1) they're going to be forever
>>tweaking and grooming and hassling and hacking in an effort to get it to run
>>efficiently - which is hopeless, since it will never be as efficient as a
>>completely native O.S.  no matter how long one fiddles with it - and (2) as
>>long as they keep attempting to use it, they're going to have to put up with
>>Unix-people...
>>
>
>Let me say first that I thought Dave's diatribe was well written and 
>mostly accurate (if one gives allowance for hyperbole).  UNIX does have flaws;
>many of us, in fact, delight in finding those flaws.
>
>But he missed the point with portability.  UNIX will never be as efficient as
>a completely native O.S., true, but with the speed of current hardware
>this issue is largely moot.  

Who says UNIX can't BE the native OS?  The Celerity C1200, for example,
is an engine designed and integrated to run 4.2BSD, and as such, does it
very efficiently.  (I don't mean this as a plug, merely as my nearest 
point of reference.)

And as for operating systems written in C or other higher-level languages
suffering from good portability at the expense of efficiency, obviously 
the solution is good compilers.  Years ago, Dartmouth started to migrate its
DTSS (at the time) to PL/I, the best compiler it had, from assembler,
and in many cases GAINED efficiency, since the compiler generated better code
than many of its systems programmers.

--- Roger Klorese
Celerity Computing