Linux Making Inroads, But Not At Windows' Expense

zaphod123 writes "According to this article, the stories about Amazon (and others) switching to Linux have been misrepresented. The Linux install has replaced a proprietary Unix system, not a Microsoft Windows product. This is still "A Good Thing" for Linux, but not the downfall of Microsoft that some have foreseen."

Comments

Very very wrong: here's why

[devphil]

Not only do I admin and program on Solaris boxes, I'm also a GCC library maintainer. There're my qualifications.

Solaris, their operating system, has few advantages over Linux, nowadays. Frankly, without adding the GNU tools, Solaris is virtually unusable!

"Frankly," you're utterly wrong. Not only is Solaris just fine and dandy, it has features for programmers which aren't anywhere near to showing up on Linux. For example:

• The proc tools, for manipulating a running process. Try using pldd(1) to find out exactly which libraries have been mapped in, or pstack(1) to print the call stack. Yes, that's right, print the function call stack of a running process from the command line, without a debugger, and it works flawlessly. There're about a dozen of these tools, man -s 1 proc for more.
• Kernel watchpoints on memory. Tell the kernel you want to know when a process tries to read or write from an arbitrary block of memory. That process when then be frozen (or killed, as per your instructions), allowing you to find out exactly what piece of code is trashing memory.
• A boatload of malloc(3) implementations. Want a version of malloc that uses brk? It's there. Want it to use mmap instead? It's there. Want a version of malloc that never reuses memory? Or a malloc which sets kernel watchpoints on its own bookkeeping structures, for when your code is hosing the malloc internal memory? It's all there.

Linux has none of these.

(And, who's gonna pay $10k for their compiler when GCC does the job?)

Severely uninformed statement, my friend. GCC doesn't generate SPARC code nearly as well as Sun's compiler. (Ask the GCC developers.) It's good but it's not there yet.

GCC cannot even generate a 64-bit binary yet. (Very close, but still some bugs.)

There are plenty of reasons to buy a SPARC, and to use Solaris, and to use Sun's software. It's all about the right tool for the right job, and Linux quite often isn't it. (I write this sitting on a Linux box.) Quit'cher karma whoring. :-)