this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
369 points (100.0% liked)
196
16098 readers
2177 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
NT 3.1 was released in 1993. But sure, the kernel has been reworked a lot since then.
And itself based on VMS, which was released in 1977.
Almost everything interesting about mass market operating systems was done in the 70s. Tons of academic work out there otherwise, but we'd have to rewrite everything to make good use of a lot of it.
L4 runs on billions of devices but it's mobile modems, car infotainment, and stuff. There's also been innovation generally in the mobile and restricted space, no desktop OS can manage application lifetimes quite as well as Android can: Because it needs to because you want both multitasking and fit everything into limited RAM.
The problem is really the "rewrite everything" part because to make current OSs much better you'd need to work on the interface between programs and OS, and not just piecemeal stuff like wayland. It was possible on mobile because everything was new, anyway, but on desktop? Truth be told our best bet at new standard APIs is wasm.