Omar Rizwan
.
@omar,
was talking with people about structured concurrency a few weeks ago, and it does feel like an underrated part of making a responsive / concurrent 'OS' is the ability to *cancel* those concurrent tasks
Omar Rizwan
.
@omar,
Omar Rizwan
.
@omar,
like you can do this pretty cleanly in Unix at the level of whole processes, so the system as a whole mostly works
but you can't really abort individual filesystem operations (which Plan 9 fixed, which I think is basically why its network-transparent fs works and doesn't hang all the time like FUSE stuff), and it's usually not safe to abort pthreads within a process (and in the browser, webworkers are similarly messy, iirc)
Omar Rizwan
.
@omar,
this cancellation problem is also a lot of what characterizes an *OS* as opposed to a normal program -- in an OS, you have very little upfront sense of the workload that you're going to run; you're constantly getting new user input that invalidates current work, you're disconnecting from networks, you're compiling and swapping in new process code (that might still be buggy and need further replacement)