Its crazy that the arguments against microkernels were basically 100% its slower.. Which these days is completely batshit insane because we are running software in VM's eating 10%+ system performance, written in languages like Java/Javascript/etc which eat another 50% before the cowboy coder comes along and imports 2GB of libraries which effectively trash the caches/tlb/etc at every opportunity due to the difficulty of creating caches with massive associativity. Which is how we get chat apps written in electron eating up a couple 4+Ghz cores and multiple GB of memory just to display what was basically possible in with mIRC and 64k of ram 20 years ago.

NT tends to be conceptually about the right trade-off (micro-kernel design, but no context switching) but then they go do stupid crap like this.

Some computers have that software.

Others don't, for example tons of embedded devices.

If you have a small, fast kernel it could be used on a variety of devices, from Raspberry Pi to Mac Pro.

mIRC could not do inline gifs. You had to draw everything in ascii. Is that not a reason enough to spend several $k in a device to handle this?

LOL, just post a link to the rich content, that is how its mostly done with hexchat these days. Of course you could just DCC the content to someone too.

But it serves to discourage anything that isn't actual conversation, which might not be a bad plan in the end.

Having been on chat from slack to discord to reddit chat to telegram... I focus back on IRC for its simplicity and lack of video and image-spam

In rare instances pictures add to the conversation. But 99 times out of 100, that pic is some reaction gif (spongebob, wat, etc). And I'd argue that these reaction images are completely worthless.

In a way, it's also the comparison between fb or reddit vs HN or lobste.rs .

Parsing and displaying a gif is not such a complicated matter that it comes anywhere close to excusing the resource gap between the two.

> Its crazy that the arguments against microkernels were basically 100% its slower.. Which these days is completely batshit insane because we are running software in VM's eating 10%+ system performance, ...

The difference is I can avoid most of that crap when I have to write performance sensitive code, I cannot avoid a slow system without dropping down to the hardware.

Slow is very relative here, the performance penalties are on the order of 5 to 10% or so in absolute throughput terms, latency is usually much better in a microkernel based system because it can use the cores more effectively and even quite a bit of the message passing overhead can be caught as long as you stay on the same physical machine by using the paging mechanism.