Re: Low Latency Patch

On Thu, Jun 29, 2000 at 09:03:54PM -0700, Bill Huey wrote:
> 
> > This is totally predictable and common. The number of really fast,
> > hot shot OS's that burn up the benchmarks before you make them powerful
> > enough to run real applications is stupendous. What makes Linux so 
> > amazing is that it has remained speedy -- but this is only because
> > it has great programmers working on it and a culture of "don't dare
> > put that crap in my OS".
> 
> Is the above flame bait ?
>  
> > Victor Yodaiken 
> 
> That's just so incredibly arrogant, I don't even know where to begin to
> address that comment.

It's actually the opposite of arrogant. Arrogance is where you think you
can make the same mistakes that everyone else has made and not pay
the price.  Linux has been enormously lucky to start with the solid design of 
Ritchie/Thompson, have the services of many top level programmers, and 
have a management that understands the dangers of feature creep.

I've seen many OS's, developed by very smart people, at companies
with huge resources, become unusable because  of too many local
optimizations that were global pessimizations.   And I've seen many
demo or early state OS projects that worked great on a tiny set of 
applications, but suddenly found that when you do the full set of
operations, you run into the same problems and same performance
limitations that everyone else has encountered. 

There is a reason why BeOS and QNX are on major size spirals and why
the company that developed the dominant graphics/audio OS is now
recasting itself as a Linux company. Pretending that same dynamic is
not a danger to Linux would be arrogance indeed.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
Victor Yodaiken 
FSMLabs:  www.fsmlabs.com  www.rtlinux.com
FSMLabs is a servicemark and a service of 
VJY Associates L.L.C, New Mexico.