Putting squeak in business.

Bruce ONeel edoneel at sdf.lonestar.org
Wed Nov 19 12:31:48 UTC 2003


"Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> I don't see why everyone is so down on the thought.  OS/2 and BeOS had
> plenty good followings during their time, and they were relatively
> imitative.  As a closer example, the Lisp Machine still has rabid
> followers today.  To do a SqueakOS seems to only take time and a
> willingness to pursue success instead of just mess around.  It's a big
> project, but it's not ridiculously big compared to the kind of efforts
> floating around these days.  Imagine 10% of Netscape in its prime. 
> Imagine 1% of go.com.
> 

As one of those lisp machine fanatics I sure wouldn't mind a
SqueakOS.  That said, again as someone who had to use
Lisp machines in production, there were more than a few 
problems.

- The file systems sucked.  Yes, that's a technical term.  How we 
wished for even a DOS FAT file system with extended file 
names, yet alone something as nice as extfs2 or bsd's ffs.
All kinds of things were poorly debugged.  Odd performance
limitations and random unrepeatable directory corruption at 
2am made the lisp file system painful.  More than one good lisper
decended into the file system code with the idea that "this can't
be too hard to fix" only to emerge days later with little or no
progress.

- The networking was not much better.  NFS was truely stunning
to watch run, basically because getting fseek to work correctly
was difficult.  Ergo we didn't run nfs as it wasn't so necessary.
TCP/IP was a bit iffy at times as well.  Reboots solved that though.
Chaosnet screwed up less often, but, only the lisp machines ran
chaosnet so there were probably less out of bound conditions deal
with.

- The scheduler was always aproached with a bit of 
trepidation, since screwing up process priorities was a 
recipe for disaster.

- Other bits were very nice, of course.  The windowing/UI was
very nice.

If someone could write a *good* file system in squeak and a
good TCP/IP stack then SqueakOS would be possible on a limited
set of hardware.  It is worth remembering that existing
file systems and tcp/ip stacks have a lot of accumulated 
knowledge coded in that might not be obvious from the 
outside.

cheers

bruce



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