Molly Rocket
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2018–2024
1:48:55 · 326K views · May 12, 2018
Casey Muratori's long talk arguing that modern software has ballooned to tens of millions of lines because of hardware and OS diversity. He proposes a stable ISA for entire system-on-a-chip packages and recalls when games shipped with their own boot disk.
HN recommends it, long as it is, as an eye-opening rant on software complexity and why systems became so complicated.
20 comments from Hacker News
This may be a little off topic, but has anybody watched Casey Muratori's proposal on SoC ISAs[0]? The video is long, but it's worth watching all of it. It sounds to me like a SoC ISA could make docker obsolete. If it ever happens, anyway. [0]: this video
Yes, modern computer systems are unbelievably complicated from the application level down to the hardware. The consequences are absolutely devastating. this video
I think the problem is that current OSes are too complicated. What does a common user really want? I'd say text editing, making presentations, multimedia, and browsing. While these sound like simple things, text editing usually happens in a Word-like format, which - from what I've heard - is ridiculously complex. The same thing holds for browsing (simple browsers don't exist anymore, and many use the same back-end for rendering). For multimedia, USB is very important, which is a very complicated format to use correctly. Then, there are tens of codecs and formats for multimedia, each with their own idiosyncrasies and ambiguities in the specs (or deviations from the spec that are so common that they are expected nowadays). The case is even worse when your OS is supposed to run on different hardware. I think this is the main reason that Apple, in general, has a much better UX: They only have to support a limited set of hardware. Casey Murati has a great rant about this: this video
That might be what OS'es currently _are_, but I disagree that it is what an OS _is_. I think fundamentally an OS is as the OP uses it, a set of code that interfaces with all your hardware to make the computer function. Heres a good talk I came across in a HN comment a little while back [1] about how games used to be developed vs how they are today. [1] - this video
I would say just look around, but it's probably because of some of the information I've seen that opened my eyes to it, so I'll point you to these two talks: this video Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow [LINK] The Thirty Million Line Problem / Casey Muratori