[net.sources.d] Comparison of Operating Systems

sroth@muddcs.UUCP (Steve Roth) (04/01/86)

     The recent postings of various versions of microemacs have provided
an interesting comparison of operating systems.  One version of microemacs
that we have been working with has code in it for a number of operating
systems including VAX/VMS, UNIX V7, AmigaDos, and MS-DOS.  Below is a com-
parison of the number of lines of C code for certain tasks under each of
those operating systems.

		    Lines of Code:
    Task	    VAX/VMS	UNIX V7	    AmigaDos	MS-DOS
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Spawn CLI	    32		13	    7		5
    Spawn Command   38		14	    10		7
    Prepare Term
	for edit    37		5	    1		0
    Clean up after
	edit	    10		1	    1		0
    Write char	    3		1	    1		1
    Flush output    11		1	    0		0
    Read char, no
	echo	    25		1	    3		1

    Furthermore, we ran termio.c (the terminal i/o routines, which are the
majority of the system-dependent code) through the C preprocessor for each
operating system.  After deleting references to include files in each one,
we found:

    Number of #includes removed:
		    5		1	    0		1
    Number of characters of preprocessor output:
		    7806	3964	    3770	3675

    Based on past experience, these statistics seem quite indicative of
the relative level of difficulty of system-level programming on each of
these operating systems.  We hope you found this information as amusing
as we did.  Have a nice day!

						Steve Roth
						Marc Sugiyama

-- 
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Steve Roth		Harvey Mudd College, Claremont California
ucbvax!sdcsvax!scgvaxd!muddcs!sroth     -or-    STEVE@YMIR.BITNET