[MiNT] Re: Ideas on BSD-like STinG features

[Martin-Eric Racine <q-funk@hal.fishpool.com>]

The following came to me from the STiK development list, but
it seemed to me that my reply should be reading material for
the MiNT list also, thus I cross-posted it.

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On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Ronald Andersson (dlanor@oden.se) wrote:

> The greatest drawback of not having signals, or BSD-like sockets etc,
> is that it is harder to port stuff to STinG without them.  
> 
> The greatest problem of making such stuff for STinG is that it's
> expected to work with systems already having variously partial
> implementations of this (ie:  MiNT, MagiC, and HS-modem).
> 
> For safe use of callbacks it may be preferable to add a gemdos extension
>  
> Of course, some things remain unsolved, such as 'fork' functions, 

I don't wanna sound like a party pooper, but it seems to me what
you're describing already exists:   it's called MiNT.

1)  GEMDOS extension
2)  threads (fork)
3)  raw devices (U:\dev)
4)  BSD sockets (MiNTnet)

I know what I'm gonna say is probably sacrilege on this list,
but wouldn't it be easier to just port MiNTnet to MagiC?

Once BSD sockets exist for both MiNT and Magic, then we can 
actually follow whatever growth happens in the Unix universe
as a whole, because both of TOS' multitasking environment will
have the right kind of networking base.

I'm not putting down anyone's effort on the STiK side, but
isn't it time we gave ourselves a faire chance of moving at
the same pace as the rest of the crowd on other platforms?

Basically, TOS could become something like BeOS, meaning by
that:  a GUI with a Unix kernel behind it.  Transposed to TOS, 
this would mean MiNT+AES or a souped-up MagiC.

Am I dreaming, or is evolution a concept that is totally alien
to the TOS universe?

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  Martin-Eric Racine * http://www.pp.fishpool.com/~q-funk/M-E/
  The Atari TT030 Homepage * http://members.tripod.com/~TT030/
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