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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:5039 comp.os.386bsd.misc:973 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!grapevine.lcs.mit.edu!kaleb From: kaleb@expo.lcs.mit.edu (Kaleb Keithley) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: A merge of FreeBSD and NetBSD? (Another person's opinion) Date: 12 Sep 93 19:50:04 GMT Organization: X Consortium, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Lines: 57 Distribution: world Message-ID: <kaleb.747863404@kanga.x.org> References: <1993Sep8.231610.9740@ccds3.ntu.edu.tw> <CD190K.FwG@latcs1.lat.oz.au><CD3JII.F5w.1@cs.cmu.edu> <26p8ul$1eb@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <MYCROFT.93Sep11213749@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <haley.747858702@husc8> NNTP-Posting-Host: kanga.x.org haley@husc8.harvard.edu (Elizabeth Haley) writes: >Remember, quite a few of the advances in automotive design came from >things designed to go MUCH faster, like race cars and rockets. Umh, yeah, do you mean like the tailfins on a '59 Cadillac? Not that I don't love 'em; I do, but they're entirely useless! Now I'm trying real hard, but I fail to see the analogy. Cars have improved almost continuously, quality control notwithstanding; although the basic technology remains unchanged from what Daimler and Olds were building 100 years ago. What is it that rocket technology has added that makes cars go faster? Cars didn't get better because of rocket technology, they got better in spite of it. Ditto for race cars. There's too many varieties of race cars to say anything meaningful; but if you stick to the race cars that most closely resemble street cars, I have yet to see a production street car that that can sustain 200 MPH (~300 KPH) and survive a full speed collision and protect the occupants so well that they can walk away from the crash. But I digress. What makes an operating system fast(er)? Either a faster CPU, or fewer instructions to execute. There's a lot of reasons why getting a faster CPU isn't always an option. So how do you get fewer instructions to execute? A) Rewrite in assembler. Since we're talking about a family of operating systems that is written in a high-level language for specific reasons, we can pretty well rule that out. B) Get a compiler with a better optimizer. Not many options there, gcc is as gcc does. Anybody got an alternative? C) Get better, more efficient algorithms. And that's where competing operating systems comes in. That's what the free market is all about. If I think I can do better then Stallman, Torvalds, Jolitz, et al, then I can take my algorithm, plug it into a freely- redistributable-source operating system, call it <my>BSD, and may the best operating system win. Okay, so the world doesn't need 20+ different flavors of BSD, but the market will take care of that. Some will take off and be successful, and some will wither on the vine for a variety of reasons. If nothing else, having several products improves the chances that someone with an existing operating system might be willing give the new algorithm a try. And if there's no one out there that recognizes the genius of the new algorithm, then it'll be a testament to just how strongly the person believes in the superiority of the algorithm if they're willing to give it a go and roll their own operating system. What this all boils down to is, it's way too early to talk about merging the varieties of <xxx>BSD. Or maybe you think the world would be a better place if we could go down to the CheChryForVolksRenVolvFiatToyDatHon dealer and buy a homogenousmobile? -- Kaleb Keithley