

Is TermKit dead? Why? - thomaspark
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/137kd9/18_months_ago_termkit_a_nextgeneration_terminal/

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fusiongyro
Such a beautiful demo. I was (am?) really looking forward to this "making it."
I do think it's going to take a pretty massive development effort to make it
work well though.

For starters, you're going to want to be dealing with objects or structured
data rather than raw strings. So you'll be rewriting or writing wrappers for a
lot of Unix. Powershell hasn't really been ported to Unix yet, presumably
because the "unix greybeards" as he puts it are dogmatically attached to plain
text as the communication medium, and not without reason. Maybe if you made
HTML or JSON the medium you could simplify this? I suspect you'll want the
opacity only live objects can provide though, and that probably means you're
opening yourself up to the usual parade of problems.

He mentions that Unix's execution model makes this kind of a non-starter. I
have no idea which things here were actually the problem, but I can definitely
see how building on very early Node exacerbated the problem. OTOH Node seems
like the "correct" platform—Lighttable is also arriving as essentially a
browser bundled with embedded Node.

In all, I hope he does pick it up. I would bet that part of why this hasn't
happened before or since is because there are many ways to approach the
problem that would work but they all probably involve deep changes to the
OS—or at least lots of new code. Microsoft can get away with these kinds of
things because they also have the whole OS and VM, and they could throw a lot
of people at an inelegant solution and still make it work. One guy, working on
it in his spare time probably can't produce that volume and there will always
be the nagging sensation that if approached from another angle it would be
less work. I don't think it's true, but I could see falling into the trap.

