Unix: A Component Architecture?

seebs writes: "I wrote an article about Unix as a component architecture for the components 'zone' at IBM's developerWorks. They ran it. Here's an article (part four of a series) looking at how Unix has delivered on the promises of the object modules and component architectures that are so popular these days." This reminds me a lot of the book The Unix Philosophy.

Comments

simple interfaces

[selectspec]

The fact that unix is really just a chain of simple interfaces is the principle reason for Linux's existance. Linus knew what the POSIX API calls looked like and what they were supposed to do, but he had no implementation to work with. He tackled them one at a time, and was able to make progress because of the nearly linear progression of the interfaces. One builds upon another. Once he'd completed most of the system api, he was able to port GCC and then BASH. From there he was able to build the much of the early user space with little effort since that work was already accomplished in other unix environments.

The fact that unix's design is so module really is the reason it has been cloned so often. Windows and VMS on the other hand were designed reasonably ad hoc with massive sets of interfaces. Emulating the operating system is virtually impossible for these systems (my apologies to the wine folks who are braver than I).