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Will Pervasive Multithreading Make a Comeback?
exigentsky writes "Having looked at BeOS technology, it is clear that, like NeXTSTEP, it was ahead of its time. Most remarkable to me is the incredible responsiveness of the whole OS. On relatively slow hardware, BeOS could run eight movies simultaneously while still being responsive in all of its GUI controls, and launching programs almost instantaneously. Today, more than ten years after BeOS's introduction, its legendary responsiveness is still unmatched. There is simply no other major OS that has pervasive multithreading from the lowest level up (requiring no programmer tricks). Is it likely, or at least possible, that future versions of Windows or OS X could become pervasively multithreaded without creating an entirely new OS?"
Given that most machines are already starting to come default with 2 cores, and you can fit 8 cores (2 CPUs) in a nice desktop package, it's pretty clear that it's going to be a requirement.
It's not entirely the operating system's fault. The biggest advance of BeOS wasn't necessarily just that the kernel was designed to multithread nicely, Be also did their best to force you to write multithreaded code when you wrote a Be application.
I suspect that the first thing that's going to become clearly a performance bottleneck is the applications. And that's not going to be fun, because there's a lot of applications out there and you can't just magically recompile them with threads turned on and see much difference. You need to synchronize the data structures for multiple threads touching them at the same time and split things up so that you can actually keep a decent number of cores busy. This is not trivial when you are talking about an app that somebody wrote single threaded in the mid 90s without any notion that threads might be useful later.
Gentoo Sucks
The ability to play eight movies simultaneously is a bad way of determining OS thread performance. Most modern operating systems have efficient, low-overhead threads. How well they play multiple videos depends much more on the display pipeline, the codec, and how the players adapt to load. To say anything about system performance, you'd need to know frame rate, resolution, codec, postprocessing options, etc.
Overall, I really don't see anything in BeOS that you don't get as well or better in a modern Linux system. BeOS has some efficiency gains from having been developed from the ground up with little need for backwards compatibility, but that's probably also why it wasn't successful in the market. And threading and scheduling in particular are highly efficient and mature in Linux.
(Not that OS X is basically a hacked NeXTStep; the NeXTStep kernel is Mach, the same kernel that is the basis of the GNU Hurd.)
I believe that's covered by "There were a few architectural decisions in BeOS that I felt would have resulted in great amounts of pain and suffering 10 years later."
Rewriting things from the ground up, without acceptable justification, has never been an effective strategy.
Gentoo Sucks
Bah. Today's programmers aren't better or worse than they were ten years ago - they're just distributed differently. Programming video games on a console is an exercise in (frustration) poor tools, worse documentation, highly constrained memory / CPU / IO / bus, multiple threads utilitizing multiple specialized processors, microcode, assembly, etc. Ditto for cell phones. Not so for business applications.
So yes, if you mean "developers of business applications aren't generally hardcore down to the metal programmers," then I'd agree with you. John Carmack and Michael Abrash would be bored out of their skulls working on UI issues for Quicken 2008. And, given their aesthetic sensibilities, they wouldn't necessarily be the best choices (just *try* to balance your checkbook).
But if you mean that great programmers are no longer among us, then I'd say that you should change jobs, because it's more likely that they're simply not around *you*.
Thank Gawd Linux isn't using any relic of an OS that started in the 1970's as its base! No, no, all 100% 21st clean legacy-free implementation there.
On a more serious note, I used Beos myself back in the day. It was definitely more responsive than Win98 was, but not everything was perfect either. The networking implementation absolutely sucked. Oh, it had lots of threads, its just that the threads were not all that beneficial to actual performance. The networking stack and some other forms of processing in the system that handle streams of many relatively similar tasks would probably parallelize better via a pipeline scheme where parallelism is achieved by having independent stages of the pipeline run in parallel (much as CPUs break up the task of executing instructions into a pipeline). The type of parallelism that works best can depend on the application, and the one-size fits all philosophy is not usually correct no matter what the solution is.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
128MB? In the mid 80s? Maybe you mean 4Mb :-)
While C++, assembly and C might no longer be "cool", it definitely teaches people how to write optimal code, how to debug efficiently, understand a wide variety of computing concepts.
The same college today is too busy teaching C# and Java. While those languages are nice and all, not teaching low level C, C++ and assembly IMO leads to sloppy coders, people who don't understand the byte code generated, people who don't mind wasting system resources because hey
I was nearly crucified when I suggested my boss to recode a piece of an application in C so it scales better than the current shitty VB COM version. He just looked through me and said: add another server! Lot of today's code is written by people who don't even understand how the code is getting executed.
I was nearly crucified when I suggested my boss to recode a piece of an application in C so it scales better than the current shitty VB COM version.
His reaction likely had little to do with code and alot to do with business. To managment's ears you said "This part is done, but I want to take time and money and re-do it really shiny." Now if craftsmanship meant anything in terms of the sales of software, you may have been listened to. But since the hardware companies are all too quick to step up and offer a new gizmo that will have you computer running "blazing fast", the consumer thinks that the sluggish performance is a hardware problem. The end result of all of this is the management of software companies sees little to no reason to take any more time or money than necessary to make a program clean and efficient.
We are all just people.
I'm so sick of hearing that most users don't need anything greater than say a P3. That is bogus. Users today do more things with their computers than was done during P3's day. Today, people retouch photos and import them into a library with thousands of photos, they render home movies taken from their camcorder, they run movies (quicktime, flash, etc.) at hi resolutions and at full screen, they rip CDs, they sometimes rip DVDs, video teleconferencing, and so much more. Heck, you need a decent system to render most popular websites today. Here's my generalization: Most slashdotters don't give "Joe Six-Pack" enough credit. He may not know how it works, but he uses more features than you think. The fact is that the software has gotten easier and more powerful, thus allowing people to use more and more features. To say that most users don't need anything more than 6 year old technology is insulting to software developers. It essentially is saying that these developers have been wasting their time for the past 6 years.
Vista, George W. Bush, elected because of his name, even though the prior iteration wasn't especially respected or well-liked. Introduced instability and performance issues, all in the name of "security". Many of the corporate interests who promoted him early on are having second thoughts.
I don't understand this logic that a "full featured" operating system has to be slow. What the hell are you OS designers doing that's eating up all the juice ? Just because Windows XP preloads a gazillion binaries doesn't mean it's a good idea.
An operating system's job is to mediate access to hardware and software resources. The fact that every modern OS is madly bloated is just proof that the world's OS developers are ADHD suburban twits getting lazy and gratuitous with fluffy GUI features, when really they should be focusing on two core things: device drivers and the almighty scheduler.
Just think about it: Windows Vista is, on average, 10% slower than XP for generic tasks and gaming. Why the hell is that ? Someone fucked with the kernel and stuck things in it that don't belong there, like that ever-annoying popup security model.
It's like any other optimization job: you tighten the hell out of the most frequently-called code snippets like the scheduler and memory manager. If your scheduler is so contorted and polluted that it can't even fit in the L1 Cache anymore, you should be beaten with your keyboard!
The BeOS guys probably had a plan, along with some good brains and coding skill, and they stuck to that plan. If a feature isn't in the plan, it doesn't get coded; the system stays lean and fast, and you let the application developers handle all the shiny stuff. That's how it used to be, and still is in some circles... but not Windows nor Linux. That's where we went wrong.
-Billco, Fnarg.com