20 Nov
2012
20 Nov
'12
4:02 p.m.
My assertion isn't that VMS is always the best OS
for the task (in
plenty of cases, it's not, and I'd actually love to hear a list of
things it's decidedly better for from someone more experienced with
it),
Well, based on experience that's some 25-30 years old, and from a
relatively unsophisticated point of view even then....
- VMS is much better at keeping application-layer programs that should
be separate actually separate.
- Its privilege model totally blows away anything Unixy, possibly
excepting some of the capability systems (and I'm not sure how Unixy
I count them - I don't know any of them well enough to really make a
fair comparison, either with my memories of VMS or with the vague
cluster of characteristics that I collectively call "Unixy").
- The I/O subsystem is much better-designed for "go do this and tell me
when it's done" async operation. Indeed, sync I/O is just a wrapper
around "make this async request and then block until it's done".
I'd be interested to know what people who know VMS better than I, or
who know more recent VMS, think of those points.
but that it had extremely good scalability way back
when
That, I never had anything to do with, so I can't comment.
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