The End of the General Purpose Operating System
Ah, the grand cycle of layering and integration. You build a machine that does a thing, modify it to do another, and another, and another, until eventually someone saysWe could have a layer that did all of this!The layer is introduced, applications are rewritten to target the layer, and people slowly lose touch with what the world looks like beneath The Interface.And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth.As people target The Interface, it grows into a more and more general purpose machine. Layers of indirection build up. Once simple tasks must propagate up and down a big stack.Until one day, someone stumbles across the layer beneath. Gosh, the underlying system does 99% of what we need, out of the box. Why do we need this layer at all? We can do most of what we need with a couple single purpose tools. And the rest of the complexity can be taken up by the application layer. I don't mind doing a little more configuration there if I can get a huge performance and complexity win.And the developers, frustrated with how big and bloated their layers have been feeling, flock to this new simple tool, and they port their applications, with a little extra boilerplate and big complexity wins. And then they port another, and another. Until someone realizesWe could have a layer that did all of this!And it might seem pointless, when I write it up in this snarky way, but it absolutely is not. This is the process by which we discover the fundamental building blocks of software. Each time we add a layer, and each time we take one away, we learn something new about what information is. I love it.