Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@thenilgiris.com writes:
ok, maybe it is still just alive - but its soon gonna be dead - and no number of C programmers can revive it
Ok., i dont wish to start a flame war here. But technically ( any OS researcher would agree ) the Hurd is a much better design than the Linux kernel. The Hurd is `Extensible` and is capable of doing things which cannot be done in a clean (not dirty hacks) way on the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is a step back in technology., because of its Monolithic design. Microkernels had their bad time., but not anymore. The future is there. Sticking with a legacy system is not a good idea.
And morover discouraging its developers by derogatory comments like above is not a very good thing. The developers of the Hurd are professional people who are playing with the best in OS technology. They ought to be respected.
The GNU/Hurd is very much usable. What lacks is support for drivers in the GNUMach microkernel. And the development of the GNU/Hurd is slow because of the lack of developers. Work is underway to make the Hurd run on the L4 microkernel which is more advanced than the GNUMach. The GNU/Hurd project needs people to test applications on it. You can basically recompile any POSIX application on the GNU/Hurd., but sometimes there are some issues.
So _definitely_ the Hurd is not a dead project., or a to be dead project., or whatever. It was started late., it did not gather momentum largely because the masses were happy with the `Linux kernel`.