Re: [COFF] Other OSes?

On Thursday, 5 July 2018 at 15:56:50 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: I came to Unix from Tandem's Guardian OS, which had clearly based on some exposure to Unix, though in many cases it was much more primitive (no hierarchical file system, for example). But it did have one area where I found it significantly superior: interprocess communication. The approach is considerably different from Unix. The system is a loosely coupled multiprocessor system which communicates by message passing, and everything, including file operations, goes via the message system. That makes IPC really the basis of system functionality, and at a user process level messages from other process are read from a special file ($RECEIVE, fd 0 when it's open). It's really difficult to compare with Unix. I've tried several times over the years, and I still haven't come to any conclusion. One problem is that Tandem's userland tools (shell and friends) are far inferior to Unix. And when we tried to shoehorn Unix onto Guardian, we ran into all sorts of conceptual issues. I wrote an overview of Guardian that was published as chapter 8 of Spinellis and Guisios "Beautiful Architecture" (O'Reilly, 2009). If you don't have access, my final draft is at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Books/t16arch.pdf. Comments welcome. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA