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Relatively speaking, any operating system from the 70s is "ancient".


Anything with non keyboard input = prehistoric.

Is it at all possible to get a peak into that world as a curious person?


Unisys not, but the one predating UNIX,

https://multicians.org/simulator.html


With Multics i'm familiar enough, i meant unisys specifically.


If you have a pile of C, switching to using C++ is not easy.

> Can you return `UniquePtr` from a function?

Yes: you can return structures by value in C (and also pass them by value).

> Can you store a copy of `SharedPtr` somewhere without accidentally forgetting to increment the refcount?

No, this you can't do.


Or even one. I know there are operating systems in use that are not written in C, but the major ones are written in C. And anyways, it's not just the OS. There's a pile of C code. Fil-C is a fantastic idea. I think Fil is going to make it good enough to use in production, and I badly want to use it in production.

Because C is very unsafe, but there are still many billions of lines of C in use, so making C safer is a great idea.

There is also Debezium. I think there are other CDC (change data capture) systems built around PG logical replication, which is itself built around logical decoding of the WAL. It's a fairly obvious idea, though I wish:

- PG did logical logging natively instead of via WAL decoding

- PG logged commit records in the WAL so that any code replaying transactions from following the logical replication stream can isolate each transaction's changes and serialize everything correctly


It would be amazing to have SunRay style just-plugin-your-smartcard and done hot desking.

And in particular it would be amazing for that to work with a) huge monitors, b) audio and video.


Oh man, I miss SunRays!

Meh, it could easily use atomics instead, no lock needed.

Because you can allocate the activation record on the heap, provide a way to reify continuations, and presto! now you have call/cc (and trivially implemented, no less)!

Price paid: a) you need a GC (ok, whatever, sure, you have one), b) well, the performance hit of having to GC activation records (you don't care; others do), c) whoops, thread-safety got much harder and maybe you can't even have threads (imagine two threads executing in the same activation record at the same time!).

That's a very very steep price.


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