Strategic Thinking (was: Re: Speculative: Rust for base system components)

[Damjan Jovanovic]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 12:37 PM Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at puchar.net> wrote:

> >
> > I come from the corporate/government environment, having spent most of
> > my time there. Large datacentres (Canadian spelling), large machines,
> > large networks of machines, large networks. In this environment, today,
> > virtualization in all forms are the platforms of business. Migrations
> > from physical platforms running AIX, Solaris and Linux to either Linux
> > on VMware or Linux containers is where they are putting 100% of their
> > effort. The language of choice is mostly Java. Much of the Java is
> > canned too. What used to be implemented on LAMP stacks is now being
> > implemented using microservices. The platform of choice for
> > microservices is Linux. Stripped down Linux primarily capable of
>
> Just as fashion changes.
> >
> > IMO we have strengths that can immediately be capitalized on, like the
> > Linuxulator. If anything could be in base it might be go, the language
>
> What do you mean "capitalized"?
>
> FreeBSD already allow to do all mentioned things, but anyway someone
> who use FreeBSD is usually smart enough  to not blidnly copy what is now
> trendy.
>
> +1000
There is way too much fashion in IT nowdays.

Maybe one of the reasons that many software stacks lately make statically
linked binaries (eg. Go and Rust), and containers that embed every
dependency are becoming popular, is that Linux has no base system and only
distro-specific packages, and thus poor API/ABI compatibility between
distros and distro versions, so it really needs these features?