What is LINUX?

[Zygomorphic]

Exactly, @nodens, I hate the COM system, it stinks, regardless of what language you are using. Even worse is when MS manages to get COM declared the standard interface for other programming libraries that it doesn't develop. Then everyone is stuck with it, and getting LINUX support is terribly difficult (if not outright impossible).

@Myk, it isn't that bad, John C. writes on a number of different levels, and his QuakeCon keynotes are well worth watching. I.E. paying homage to the god of computer graphics... They are really informative, and he just talks and answers questions, even off the wall ones about his cars...

[Nodens]

Exactly, @nodens, I hate the COM system, it stinks, regardless of what language you are using. Even worse is when MS manages to get COM declared the standard interface for other programming libraries that it doesn't develop. Then everyone is stuck with it, and getting LINUX support is terribly difficult (if not outright impossible).

Yeah! I avoid the use of COM as much as possible. Often doing more work in order to avoid using COM objects. I'll gladly do a few hours of extra work to avoid it if I can. Unfortunately that is not always possible under Windows (specially with DX). Sometimes you just can't avoid it. I prefer working with shared memory interfaces for inter-process communication but message queues and semaphores work for me also. COM is just...Meh..

EDIT: In fact I have yet to meet a programmer who actually likes COM. I've met people who are so used to it that it doesn't bother them anymore (doing things mechanically) but no one that actually likes it... And prior to SxS assemblies everyone outright hated it due to the infamous dll hell you could end up with..

[martyn]

Have you by any chance read John Carmack's OpenGL rant? It's famous, and a good read.

Do you have a link to this? Not laziness, just curiosity and wanting to ensure i read the correct article. I'm sure it would interest others out there also.

[Zygomorphic]

Here is the rant:
http://www.bluesnews.com/archives/carmack122396.html

I have used COM enough with .NET languages to be okay with it. In those places, it isn't so bad, but I would prefer to use DllImport() calls instead, because that's more portable - it's also easier to use.

[martyn]

Thanks Zy - Duly read, heck, some even understood (non programmer) ....... A shame about the yellow type though - copy paste into notepad or word highly recommended to struggling through the text in yellow on black

[Zygomorphic]

Thanks Zy - Duly read, heck, some even understood (non programmer) ....... A shame about the yellow type though - copy paste into notepad or word highly recommended to struggling through the text in yellow on black

Ahh, the classic monitors... No problems about the link, it's a pretty easy Google find if you know what you're looking for. Oh, and if you want more by the same guy, Google "John Carmack Quakecon keynote" and go to the Youtube links. He's got lots of stuff "on there".

[Arne Saknussemm]

U R FULL OF CRAP !

This really is not the way we go about on this Forum and while I have no say here other than that of fellow user I'd ask for no more.

Express your opinion by all means but in a civilised manner...the contributions in this thread are not good ones....

[Nodens]

@Marco. First of all you should correct your attitude towards other users. This is your second warning in this very thread. There won't be a third one, it will be a vacation to cool off instead. We respect each other here and talk in a civilized manner.

Now regarding your points:

a) You seem to want to be "entirely correct" but you are not. The term UNIX or UNIX variants is used nowadays for ALL operating systems following the UNIX philosophy. What you claim is absolutely wrong. If you want to be "entirely correct" then there is no UNIX operating system AT ALL! The last true UNIX was SCO Unixware. Everything else, including BSD and Solaris, are POSIX compliant operating systems. The Open Group has control of the UNIX trademark and uses it for all "Open" named operating systems but that does not make them UNIX. They are what they are and that is POSIX compliant operating systems. Period.

b) Linux is not just for desktop. That is your own misconception based on lack of knowledge. There are millions of servers out there running RHEL and CentOS. Your opinion is not fact. It is just your opinion.

c) You also make the mistaken assumption that server == ZFS filesystem. This is your first mistake. The choice of filesystem depends on the workload and hardware configuration. ZFS is not the defacto standard for all servers. Quite the contrary, very few servers with specific workloads use ZFS. Your second mistake is that you think Linux does not support ZFS when it does so. Even the link you posted tells you that. Did you even read it? Because at this point I am getting the idea that you are just randomly googling stuff and copy/paste things that you do not even understand.

d) BSD license is better than GPL for what purpose? And for whom? Do you even know the differences?
BSD: A permissive license that lets anyone use the code for whatever purpose including commercial gain/closed source projects.
GPL: A copyleft license that forces you to keep the source open of anything you derive our of open source work.

So this boils down to:
BSD license is better for you if you plan to steal code for your personal benefit. Or if you plan to use open source technologies to develop something closed source that you can profit from.

GPL license is better for open source software as a total and for every coder that contributes to an open source project as it protects the code against the above practices. Someone will not steal the work you donated to the public so they can profit. If they use the code they have to keep it open.

Which translates to GPL is a better license for everyone other than those that want to profit with other people's work.

e) Has to do with license clashes. GNU toolchain is far superior than anything on these platforms and it's a standard in development. So that's actually a HUGE loss for BSD.

f) Random articles on the net. I don't know if I should even comment on that anyhow. The reality of things is that you choose an OS for your needs. BSD on the Desktop is not going to happen. Hardware support alone is miles in the past.


Regarding your comments on John Carmack. I don't know why you try to talk about things you don't know or don't understand.

Carmack has given a huge battle for OpenGL when the battle was going on. The fact is that Carmack was the OpenGL evangelist and DID not take the money MS was pumping out to all studios for them to adopt DX. Right above your post there is even a link by Zygomorphic with Carmack's comments on the subject back in the day. Did you read it? Obviously not.

RAGE is indeed using OpenGL. I have no idea what you're talking about. If you think it's a DX engine you're sadly mistaken yet again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_5

I also have no idea why you posted the rest of the links!?!

[Zygomorphic]

@Marco, I thought I should weigh in on this issue. I think we are discussing two different things, from two different workloads. BSD has certain advantages, and LINUX has certain advantages. It all depends on what you are trying to do with your system. Just like the discussion about DirectX vs OpenGL, Carmack is weighing in as a user, whose loyalty depends on the quality of each competitor. There are advantages to both systems, and depending on your background, you can lean one way or another.

@Nodens, LLVM / Clang has gotten a whole lot better in the last few years, their rate of development is actually quite impressive. There are benchmarks that indicate that it can generate "faster" code than GCC, but it depends on compiler flags and particular systems, so its not much of an advantage. As you know, hand-optimized assembly is faster still.

@Marco, @Nodens point about the licenses are also valid, GPL protects the open source community, and that's why it's so lengthy. BSD does not. If you prefer your work to be usable and proprietizable (<- ?new word? ), the BSD license allows that. The GPL does not. However, @Nodens, there is the LGPL, which is designed to protect code that calls a GPL library, so any changes to the library itself must be released, but not the code that calls said library. In my opinion, each of these licenses has a place. LINUX, last I checked is under GPL v2, because Linus Torvaalds said that there are too many people involved in the LINUX system now that he would have to clear a change to v3 with. He decided to stick to v2 for the time being.

As to BSD on the desktop, I can't judge. If more hardware drivers get written, then yes, it could be done. Apple has proved that BSD-derivatives can be used as consumer OS's, at least for limited sets of specific hardware. For the masses of other systems, we can't say at present. Windows manages it, and so does LINUX. BSD could do it, if the developers have the resources - and think it important.

@Marco, let's be nice, and play nice. We can disagree civilly, without resorting to personal slams or attacks. That's part of the spirit of ROG. If you know how to get BSD running on some ASUS hardware, then please post a thread detailing your instructions, we'd all love to see it! ROG on, as @c would say.

[Nodens]

I think you did some reserching for this post, BSD is not UNIX as said, there is no licence from AT & T UNIX since BSD4.x

I did no research for this post because simply I've done my research over the years that I am using, developing on and collecting various operating systems. I have SCO UNIX System V/386 on original floppies...

WRONG, knowledge about file systems ...

ZFS for linux is not production ready, said from two of the "important" guys from ZFS, from the openzfs programmer and a zfs guru who wrote a handbook about it.
I saw a EXT4 vs UFS server benchmarks, the freeBSD RAM filesystem is much faster than the linux one, and EXT4 is much faster than UFS, ZFS should be slower, because of the hashchecks on the CPU in the filesystem.
BtrFS is not produktion ready, openSuse has the hands deep into it, recommand SNAPPER & BtrFS on OpenSuse13.01 !

What you post here is not knowledge about filesystems. It's random stuff with no real significance.
1) ZFS is production ready on Linux and it IS used on production Linux servers. No matter what you claim here.

2) Of the file systems you mentioned only BtrFS is not production ready. Period.

3) You completely neglected to mention XFS, which most production servers prefer over ZFS when the server has anything to do with large filesystems and uses hardware RAID, like it should. ZFS is only preferred on systems where software RAID would be used and only due to its block level CRC checks. But it is a small part of the server market. It depends on what you are actually doing with the server, like I said. These filesystems have their use ONLY on servers dealing with large amount of data. We're talking file servers/data centers etc and only when specific conditions are met.
Regardless of you being wrong about ZFS in the first place (which you are no matter how much you may insist otherwise--it is production ready and it IS used in production systems), the biggest flaw in your claims is that you're making a blanket statement about servers using a specific filesystem that has a very specific use as being the end-all feature required by all servers. This makes your argument moot int he first place.

Hmm, i guess you don't have a clue what you are talking about.

If you say so...

BSD license 2 lines
GPL2 or 3 4 DIN A4 sides of lines (DIN)

So the value of a license and how good it is, depends on how many lines it is. Great! That is good to know. Next time I have to deal with a license I won't call my lawyer. I will simply decide on the amount of pages. Or should I just count words? I mean in case there's a bigger font used in one than the other???

I am explaining to you the differences between the licenses and you're telling me the BSD license is better because its two lines. Now I can't help but wonder why do I bother replying to you..

it's all written i C and without the C-programmer who died recently we have something else ...

I have no idea what you mean by that. You mean the toolchains are all written in C? If that's what you mean, then you're once more mistaken. They compile C/C++. GCC was firstly written in asm. Then once it became powerful enough to compile itself, parts of it were slowly converted into C. This is how the majority of compilers are made. Something you would know if you were actually a programmer.

freeBSD10 got rid of GCC wich is GPL license and some other programms witch security issues in it & GPL license
BSDNowTV#Tendresse for Ten | BSD Now 21
Open BSD versus Linux - Daniel Seuffert klärt auf (deutsch)

Like I said. They got rid of it because of "License clashing". Not because they wanted to. No one in their right mind would get rid of the GCC toolchain on a UNIX variant unless they had to.

GNUToolchain
Maybe you are WRONG again ... Iam not an expert what it means for BSD ... freeBSD uses now LLVM / Clang by default, and they are very happy about that !

And it is faster too ...

You clearly have no idea about programming yet you are debating programming tools...
a) It is only faster if specific conditions are met. But that is the same for everything else.

b) Find me a popular open source project (apart from BSD internals) that actually has optimizations for LLVM /Clang or even that has been written with that in mind. You will find close to 0. GCC is the defacto standard. That is what everything is optimized, supported and maintained for. Also good luck having open source projects supporting or optimizing for it in the future. Unless it's something that is meant to run on BSD or that has BSD as it's primary target platform. It won't happen.

I found it, GL with your OS ^ ^

No matter what you say, BSD wont' run on the latest hardware. Even on Linux there are very few distros that support cutting edge hardware. If BSD starts supporting cutting edge hardware it could happen BUT it won't. Because it's not aimed at the desktop.

I am a Quakeplayer since 1999, and iam no fanboy of carmack anymore, the only thing he did to our enjoyment was programming QuakeIIIArena, get your facts right.

Seriously? First you tell me that Carmack won't touch OpenGL, then you tell me RAGE/idtech5 is DX based and now you tell ME to get MY facts straight?! Right!

he did run RAGE on IOS with 60fps, but did he consider to port it to IOS & ofc linux / freeBSD ?

It does not need porting. The engine is compatible. It just needs compiling. But their publishers are not targetting these platforms so they won't launch it there. Carmack specifically said though that a Linux binary will pop up at some point so the Windows version can be run on Linux natively FYI. Also like all other id engines, idtech5 does not contain proprietary code and is scheduled to go open source at some point. So anyone will be able to do what they want with it.

NOPE, btw IOS/[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X]OSX[] comming from Darwin wich is BSD/Unix

Entirely irrelevant.

RAGE has no Linux support, since TTimo left id, what a sould out company ... i left playing QL because of "Window's only" mentality of Xenimax / Bethesda

Let me correct the above for you. RAGE has no Linux version because the publishers do not care launching it on Linux. Carmack, as I said above has stated thought hat a Linux binary will show up at some point. id Software's engines all compile natively on Linux. They don't need porting or anything else.

BTW, that old openGL article from Carmack, i heard his comment on the openGL development, and since idsoft is no more alone, what do you think will happen to the support with openGL on idTech5 ...
YT QuakeCon query keynote
http://www.google.de/search?q=carmack+on+opengl+4
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

a) id Software is still id Software. Nothing has changed.
b) Nothing with happen to "OpenGL support" because id Software engines ARE and WILL be based on OpenGL. Period.
c) It's not "OpenGL support". It's the graphics API the engine is coded in. It doesn't support OpenGL, it is MADE with OpenGL. You can't "remove" OpenGL from it as then you'd have no engine. Still Carmack is dedicated to OpenGL and hance so is id Softtware. You posted his twitter above. It might do you some good to actually follow him and read his tweets.

read & see = learning !

!?!?!