karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) (05/23/89)
In article <281@jwt.UUCP>, john@jwt.UUCP (John Temples) writes: > ...But in the > multitasking benchmarks, Unix consistently had a 3 to 1 performance edge over > OS/2. It sounds like OS/2 has a long way to go compete with Unix in > performance. Further, OS/2 has not been used enough (compared to Unix) to determine if it is complete and reasonable, or if there are quirks and weirdnesses introduced by what's there in terms of calls versus what you often want to do, and what kind of contortions are necessary to do what you want. As an example, the IBM PC did not have a BIOS call to output a string (or it was brain-dead "$"-terminated, I'm not sure) and single-character BIOS calls were terribly slow for writing to the display... The resultant kludge was that programs wrote directly to the display, and DOS people are still suffering from that because it makes multitasking really hard to implement. (Perhaps Digital Research could have done a better job with it had CP/M-86 been dominant rather than MS-DOS. DR already had MP/M (multitasking CP/M) on Z80's. Microsoft was a language house.) A prediction: Unix is going to support threads in wide-use implementations, like the 386, in the not too distant future. Threads are not a compelling argument in favor of OS/2, especially if one cares about compatibility with non-80x86 hardware, particularly for those trying to maintain a pathway into these new ultrahigh-performance RISC processors. Unix. [...drifting afield of the Amiga here I admit, but it is the interest in multitasking of so many of us in this forum that makes it a recurrent topic, and the Amiga is at the very least an interesting realtime multitasking machine.] -- -- uunet!sugar!karl | "Woof!" -- Free Usenet BBS (713) 438-5018