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The Dawn of Haiku OS (Spectrum)The Dawn of Haiku OS (Spectrum)Posted Apr 30, 2012 16:43 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)In reply to: The Dawn of Haiku OS (Spectrum) by whitemice Parent article: The Dawn of Haiku OS (Spectrum)
"It is simply the fact that LINUX is much older than Be-OS"
I don't think Linux is any older, and certainly not "much". Be Inc. was founded in 1990, and BeOS claims to date back to 1991. It's old enough to have been written for the ill-fated Hobbit CPU architecture and had to be ported to PowerPC and then Intel.
BeOS was trying to be more "forward looking". So while Linux soon needed a traditional Unix "big lock" multi-processor conversion, BeOS was designed for symmetric multi-processor systems from the outset, and instead of needing _LARGEFILE_SOURCE BeOS always defined off_t as a 64-bit value too. However more often than not their crystal ball was cloudy. They wrote for the ill-fated Hobbit CPU, they assumed Internet connectivity was relatively unimportant, and they relied heavily on C++ before it had even been standardised, let alone settled on a maintainable ABI. As a result of that last misstep Haiku must rely upon GCC 2.x because that's the last compiler which implements the C++ ABI the original BeOS R5 is wedded to.
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The Dawn of Haiku OS (Spectrum) Posted May 1, 2012 1:31 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]
> I don't think Linux is any older, and certainly not "much". Be Inc.
It is considerably older on 'normal' hardware. The early BeOS was multi-core in an age when multi-core PCs, and even multi-core workstations, were quite rare.
There architecture on the x86 hardware of the time would have been epic-fail. Even the ringed security architecture of NT 3.5 a few years later was brutal on the hardware at the time [hence the faster but in some ways inferior NT 4.0 that followed].
>and BeOS claims to date back to 1991.
I remember it. And it ran on very proprietary and very expensive hardware. It got some press in the excellent UNIX Workstation magazine and some others [back when there were interesting IT periodicals... sigh].
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