[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 95, Issue 35

[Konrad Rosenbaum]

Thank god it's Friday!

On Friday, 30 August 2019 12:34:20 CEST Roland Hughes wrote:
> Yeaaaah. I always have trouble calling anything a "process" in the
> wanna-be CPU world.

Yeah, who isn't pining for the "good olde dayes" of PDP-11 and VAX!

> Actually it's more the wanna-be OS world. 

..or griping for real OS'es! Who needs a hierarchy in a file system! Why have 
complex storage systems if you can have records in your files!

> A thread is a lightweight process. 

On some systems they have been likened to lightweight processes. On others 
(like almost all modern ones) this is a gross oversimplification that borders 
on the absurd!

> Linux (and most other x86 based operating
> systems) only have lightweight processes. 

Bullshit! 

For one: on Linux both threads and processes are implemented as tasks with 
varying degrees of resource sharing.

For another: most modern systems (including Linux, Windows, MacOS/X) have a 
fully developed concept of processes, threads, tasks and kernel threads that 
is not that different from the concepts of systems running on what used to be 
called "big iron".

> When you get into OpenVMS,
> Z/OS, AS/400, TANDEM, etc. you get real processes and real threads. 

You do realize you are talking Bullshit now - right?

I haven't worked with those other three, but OpenVMS does have processes very 
similar to Unix - the main difference being that child processes cannot 
survive their parent and there are a couple of IPC mechanisms that just don't 
make sense outside VMS. Whether that is better or worse is debatable.

This is my personal opinion, but I find the process related concepts on e.g. 
Linux (processes, tasks, cgroups, namespaces) much more mature than what you 
get on a modern OpenVMS. This is not VMS' fault - it simply doesn't have the 
same number of developers.

I guess that you also realize that you are implicitly accusing the chief 
designer of OpenVMS of making a conceptually much worse OS with Windows NT - 
right?

> The
> concept of something not having enough weight to be a thread on a real
> platform being called a "process" and that is has even lighter things
> people are trusting, in many cases with human life, always causes me issues.

Don't drink and write - it is embarrassing... :-P

> At any rate, having all of the GUI _have_ to occur in the main event
> loop (not to mention all of the bad examples showing database I/O,
> serial comm and other things there which should not be there) has been a
> real problem in the Qt world for years.

There is nothing as fun and as profitable like a good solid non sequitur!


	Konrad

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