[Info-vax] VMS internals design, was: Re: BASIC and AST routines

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2021-11-27 01:04, VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> In article <snrbgf$7td$3 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>> On 2021-11-25, VAXman-  @SendSpamHere.ORG <VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote:
>>> In article <sno4v1$efp$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>>>>
>>>> Compared to later operating system designs the internal design
>>>> of VMS is a direct product of the 1970s mindset because it is
>>>> ugly, hard to alter, not modular, full of internal hacks such
>>>> as jumping internally all over the place and was designed when
>>>> it was getting close to the end of when assembly language was
>>>> considered to be both an acceptable system implementation language
>>>> and an application language.
>>>
>>> What's hard to alter?  Many people say an alternator is difficult to
>>> replace.  I did one two weeks ago.
>>>
>>
>> Have you ever looked inside the Linux internals to see how clean
>> they are compared to VMS internals ?
> 
> Statement such as yours are purely unfounded without proofs.  What is
> so *unclean* in the VMS internals?  I've never seen a book written as
> well as the OpenVMS Internal and Data Structures Manual for Linux.  I
> demand a proof but not before you answer my question that you have so
> completely ignored or skirted around since the inception of this long
> thread.

In a way, David is actually completely incorrect. The internals of Linux 
is changing all the time. You'll have problems running software more 
than a year or two old if it's kernel internal, since the APIs inside 
the kernel constantly is changing.

And why is that? Well, obviously because the people writing them and 
using them constantly realize ways in which they are not good.

The various BSD systems would be better arguments here. They actually 
try to think a little more before doing something, as opposed to Linux, 
which is really a case of "do first, think later".

So, no. The claims Simon make are totally unfounded. However, it is 
fairly easy to change and evolve in Linux or other Unix like systems, 
which shows that there is *something* that is right in there. But it's 
not the internals are well designed, stable, and well working.
But there is a simplicitly and modularity, which can be traced back to 
Unix of old, which have been a big reason for the good properties in there.
But had the Linux kids been doing things from scratch on their own, it 
would most likely have been a mess that noone would have wanted to touch.

   Johnny