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properly
From: "Steven Levine"
On Sun, 25 Dec 2011 06:30:17 UTC, "James J. Weinkam"
wrote:
Hi,
> What astonishes me is that in an operating system developed largely by IBM,
with all their corporate experience,
> starting in the late eighties, such matters were left to chance. In a
properly designed operating system nothing is left
> to chance. Process synchronization primitives have been well known since the
sixties. I think the word that best
> describes such a design is incompetence. Sad.
IMO, it's easy, but misguided, to second guess code that was written
20 years ago and that we choose to continue to use. The fact that it
is still very functional for the vast majority of what we choose to
use it for is a testament to the quality of this code.
All code has defects. Humans are not smart enough to make defect free
code for sufficiently complex systems. There are also ROI issues, but
that's a different topic.
The defects we see are generally things that could not be detected
until fast, multicore systems became sufficiently prevalent to make it
obvious that something got though QA.
This is not to say I have not seen some stupid code. One piece that
comes to mind is IBM's failed attempt to make tcpip32.dll multi-thread
safe. However, I'm sure that this fix was done long after any but a
few in IBM cared about OS/2 and that it was done by inexperienced
(i.e. low-cost) programmers.
Steven
--
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Steven Levine
eCS/Warp/DIY etc. www.scoug.com www.ecomstation.com
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