> I don't think these rewrites will ever be mainstream.
Forever is a long time. And there's always a huge appetite amongst smart young developers to create their own ecosystem. After all, you don't become Linus Torvalds by contributing to linux. You become linus torvalds by creating your own operating system from scratch.
Whether or not new implementations become valuable and get maintained over time is an open question. But the energy is definitely there. (Even though its not necessarily pointed in the direction of economically useful, long lived software.)
> typically ports focus on the 90% that is easy to write and neglect the remaining 10%.
I hear a claim like: "The current C version of most tools is the only place, and only project which will ever bother solving its chosen problem properly." I'm not sure if tahts quite what you mean, but its a wildly bold claim. Even in C and C++, this seems already false. There's several good, solid, standards compliant SQL databases. And OS kernels. And compilers. And web browsers. If there's room for several C based OS kernels, do you really think there'll never be a viable OS kernel in rust, Zig or Odin? Or a web browser or compiler?
> And there's always a huge appetite amongst smart young developers to create their own ecosystem. After all, you don't become Linus Torvalds by contributing to linux. You become linus torvalds by creating your own operating system from scratch.
The tech landscape was completely different back then. Linus himself stated that had BSD been free at the time, he wouldn't have started working on a free MINIX clone. He worked to solve a concrete problem (the lack of a free UNIX-like kernel), he didn't partially rewrite something that exists and works well just to "create his own ecosystem."
Ok, that might be true of Linus himself. But I'm not sure what point you're making by bringing that up. Give up then? Linux forever, lets never try and iterate and improve?
Its weird talking to people in this thread. I get the impression lots of folks would really like it if the actual C code making up linux stayed in place forever. Like it would be a good thing if humans exploring the cosmos in the year 3025 were still logging in using pam, written in C. And not just C, but the current lines of code we have right now. Why? Because! Because C is the best at things. Things like dynamic linking! Because don't change what works. Because if you rewrite something you might get bugs. Because C is fast and efficient. Oh, never mind fast and efficient - lets compile it with Fil-C even though it makes it really slow, just so long as we don't have to change the code!
I think gnu/linux could be way better than it is now, in lots of ways. I get the impression that we - as a species - have barely scratched the surface of the design space for operating systems. The UNIX model is a really early design attempt. Is it the best design that will ever exist? Of course not. Do you know how the unix socket API came about? It was an intern / grad student at berkley who happened to be at the right place and right time. They invented an API and its basically never been changed since then. Because its the right API? No. Just because they were there and it was too hard to change it later.
I want proper capabilities. I want a microkernel. I want faster syscalls. I want storage that's relational, not just file based. I want atomic disk operations. I want programs which can be migrated between computers while they're running. I want supervisor trees. I want data that can be moved or shared between computers. I want my programming languages which can talk to each other using something richer than the C ABI. I want debugging tools that work with lots of languages. I want to be able to download and run programs from the internet safely, without risking all my data. This is all technically possible today.
But the idea of just making a bug for bug compatible, drop in replacement of a single tool like sudo is met with so much hostility and distrust from the community. Sometimes I think I live in a different world than most people. I think things can be better. I want things to be better. But we can't get there if we can't accept any change.
Forever is a long time. And there's always a huge appetite amongst smart young developers to create their own ecosystem. After all, you don't become Linus Torvalds by contributing to linux. You become linus torvalds by creating your own operating system from scratch.
Whether or not new implementations become valuable and get maintained over time is an open question. But the energy is definitely there. (Even though its not necessarily pointed in the direction of economically useful, long lived software.)
> typically ports focus on the 90% that is easy to write and neglect the remaining 10%.
I hear a claim like: "The current C version of most tools is the only place, and only project which will ever bother solving its chosen problem properly." I'm not sure if tahts quite what you mean, but its a wildly bold claim. Even in C and C++, this seems already false. There's several good, solid, standards compliant SQL databases. And OS kernels. And compilers. And web browsers. If there's room for several C based OS kernels, do you really think there'll never be a viable OS kernel in rust, Zig or Odin? Or a web browser or compiler?