Favorite operating systems query
Larry McVoy
larry at geowhiz.UUCP
Mon Jun 16 11:57:27 AEST 1986
In article <339 at valid.UUCP> sbs at valid.UUCP (Steven Brian McKechnie Sargent) writes:
>
> 1) For the VMS fans out there: what's your favorite feature(s) of
> the system? Why do you like it? How does it help you?
I think that the main complaints with Unix from VMSites are
1) the BSD fortran compiler is the worst excuse for a compiler the world has
ever seen (reports of 4 to 400 times slower than VMS fortran).
2) Related to (1), VMS fortran is a SUPERSET of ANSI Fortran 77 *and* is the
defacto scientific standard. There are very few scientific research
centers (remember science includes physics, math, chemistry; computer
science is only questionably a science) that don't have Vaxen running VMS
with the VMS fortran compiler. A great deal of established software depends
on the extensions provided by DEC.
3) Likewise with DCL (Dec Command Language). It's like sh with more obscurity.
*Large* DCL programs exist (my father who is a physicist has a modelling
program with an enormous dcl frontend, like 10-15K lines. Unfortunately,
stuff like this is not uncommon). This could be solved by writing a dcl-like
shell.
4) EDT - the VMS screen editor. Somebody already fixed this by writing an emacs
interface to emulate EDT.
5) Real time support. Other than Masscomp's RTU, VMS is the only company that I
know of which supplies real time support.
[From here on out they are my personal complaints; 1-5 were complaints that I
have to listen to everytime I bump into a VMS person. They are as of yet
blissflly ignorant of #6].
6) File system. Why, oh, why, must the Unix file system be so fragile? VMS
never loses your files. And it's faster to boot up. I have no idea what
the difference is in design but somebody ought to have a look & see what
could be done.
7) IPC. Shared memory, sockets, pty's, pipes, ioctls all over the place. And
the only one that's not been hacked in as an after thought is pipes. IPC in
Unix bytes the giant weenie. Talk to the guys at CMU, they've got all kinds
of literature defending Mach based on this (and other design) problems.
8) Robustness. VMS almost *never* crashes. Unix crashes all the time. You
damn near can't survive without source because you're always fixing
something. DEC has never handed out VMS src. Unix is the ultimate example
of "the quick fix solution"; those solutions always turn out to be wrong
in the long run (trust me, this is the voice of experience talking. Sigh).
9) Related to (7), networking support. Sockets are gross. This isn't just
my opinion, ask the DoD what they think of sockets. Remote filesystems,
remote devices, etc, are all being kludged in by every OEM in the field.
Have fun trying to make them all work together. Design? We don't need no
stinkin' design, we got 10,000 lines of code.
OK, now that I've got all the fanatics foaming at the mouth, let me throw in my
disclaimer. I've been a Unix fanatic myself for the past 4 years. I'm just
not blind to the problems that exist in Unix. As a research vehicle, as a
development system, it's the nicest thing I've ever used. However, I have
real problems recommending Unix as a "users" system. It needs a nursemaid
to survive properly. Read net.mail - every time the postmaster at some large
site leaves his job the mail gets all fouled up. What happened to programs
that run themselves, without being nursed? Unix has too much folklore &
guru-ness about it to be accepted into the mainstream.
--
Larry McVoy
-----------
Arpa: mcvoy at rsch.wisc.edu
Uucp: {seismo, topaz, harvard, ihnp4}!uwvax!geowhiz!larry
"Just remember, wherever you go -- there you are."
-Buckaroo Banzai
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