The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>
To: Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Systematic approach to command-line interfaces
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2021 20:27:23 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <55D95A34-3644-4A95-B94F-76EC1A37D729@iitbombay.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <202108030149.1731nIsp395841@darkstar.fourwinds.com>

On Aug 2, 2021, at 6:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> Bakul Shah writes:
>> Or perhaps the issue is not having graphics/GUI designers with the
>> creativity and sensibilities of the early Bell Labs crowd of researchers?
>> I keep thinking there ought to be something simpler/more elegant than
>> the current graphics subsystems....
>> 
>>> On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:16 AM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> It's a measure of Unix having been wounded by its own success.
>>> 
>>> fork() is a great model for a single-threaded text processing pipeline to
>> do automated typesetting.  (More generally, anything that is a straightforward
>> composition of filter/transform stages.)  Which is, y'know, what Unix is *for*.
>>> 
>>> It's not so great for a responsive GUI in front of a multi-function interactive program.
>>> 
>>> These days, the vast majority of Unix applications are "stuff people play with on their phones."
>>> 
>>> Adam
> 
> I thought that I posted something about this recently when someone
> was arguing for threads being unnecessary and bad.
> 
> My two cents is that GUIs were the big driver for threads.  I would
> personally like to get rid of them as they're "the same but different"
> with regards to processes.  My preference would be to solve the
> heaviness of processes problem.  I'm not in the thick of that these
> days, but I don't see it being solved in software alone; it's going
> to take some serious hardware/software architecture work.  Might be
> easier to accomplish now that the world has pretty much settled on
> the process model.
> 
> Jon

AFAIK pretty much all GUI frameworks are (or were) single threaded.
At least I don't see the GUI as the main motivation for threads.

I was mainly complaining about the complexity of graphics subsystem,
including user interaction. Don't see what fork() has to do with it.

  parent reply	other threads:[~2021-08-03  3:27 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 87+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-08-02  2:42 Douglas McIlroy
2021-08-02 14:58 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-08-02 18:15   ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-02 18:24     ` Warner Losh
2021-08-02 20:55     ` John Cowan
2021-08-02 21:06       ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-02 21:25         ` Dan Cross
2021-08-02 21:59           ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-02 22:33             ` John Cowan
2021-08-03  0:20           ` [TUHS] fork (Re: " Bakul Shah
2021-08-03  0:59             ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-03  1:20               ` Steve Nickolas
2021-08-03  0:21     ` [TUHS] " Bakul Shah
2021-08-03  1:49       ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-03  3:21         ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-03  3:27         ` Bakul Shah [this message]
2021-08-03  3:51           ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-03  7:19   ` arnold
2021-08-03 23:12     ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-04 15:04       ` Paul Winalski
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2021-10-01 12:11 Paul Ruizendaal
2021-09-30 11:41 Douglas McIlroy
2021-09-29 18:07 Noel Chiappa
2021-09-29 19:04 ` Dan Cross
2021-09-29 19:12 ` Larry McVoy
2021-09-28 18:15 Noel Chiappa
2021-08-03 19:12 Douglas McIlroy
2021-08-03 15:01 Douglas McIlroy
2021-08-03 17:13 ` Tom Lyon via TUHS
2021-08-11 18:11   ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2021-08-11 21:24     ` Tom Lyon via TUHS
2021-07-31 16:47 Ron Young
2021-08-02  2:34 ` Jim Carpenter
2021-08-02  2:38   ` Ron Young
2021-07-31 16:27 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2021-07-31 12:25 Michael Siegel
2021-07-31 13:05 ` Dan Halbert
2021-07-31 14:21 ` Adam Thornton
2021-07-31 14:25   ` Adam Thornton
2021-07-31 15:45 ` Richard Salz
2021-07-31 16:03   ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 16:06     ` Richard Salz
2021-07-31 16:21       ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 16:17     ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 16:30       ` Dan Cross
2021-07-31 15:56 ` Paul Winalski
2021-07-31 16:19   ` Dan Cross
2021-08-01 17:44     ` Chet Ramey
2021-08-01 21:53       ` Dan Cross
2021-08-01 23:21         ` Chet Ramey
2021-08-01 23:36         ` John Cowan
2021-08-01 23:49           ` Larry McVoy
2021-08-02  0:28             ` Larry McVoy
2021-08-01 23:58           ` Dan Cross
2021-08-02  0:29             ` Steve Nickolas
2021-08-02  0:13           ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-02  0:18             ` John Cowan
2021-08-02  0:54               ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-02  1:04               ` Dan Cross
2021-08-02  1:05             ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-08-02  2:10               ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-02  2:32               ` Bakul Shah
2021-08-02 17:33             ` Lars Brinkhoff
2021-09-28 17:46             ` Greg A. Woods
2021-09-28 18:10               ` Larry McVoy
2021-09-29 16:40                 ` Greg A. Woods
2021-09-29 16:57                   ` Larry McVoy
2021-09-30 17:31                     ` Greg A. Woods
2021-09-29 23:10               ` Phil Budne
2021-08-02 17:37           ` Lars Brinkhoff
2021-08-02 18:52             ` Clem Cole
2021-08-02 20:59               ` John Cowan
2021-08-02 21:06                 ` Al Kossow
2021-08-02 21:14                 ` Clem Cole
2021-08-02 21:13               ` Clem Cole
2021-08-01 16:51   ` Michael Siegel
2021-08-01 17:31     ` Jon Steinhart
2021-07-31 16:41 ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 17:41   ` John Cowan
2021-07-31 17:30 ` Anthony Martin
2021-07-31 17:46   ` John Cowan
2021-07-31 18:56   ` Michael Siegel
2021-07-31 19:41     ` Clem Cole
2021-07-31 21:30       ` Michael Siegel
2021-08-01 17:48     ` Chet Ramey
2021-08-01 19:23       ` Richard Salz
2021-08-01 23:26         ` Chet Ramey

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=55D95A34-3644-4A95-B94F-76EC1A37D729@iitbombay.org \
    --to=bakul@iitbombay.org \
    --cc=jon@fourwinds.com \
    --cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).