You may disagree with our rationale, but it is absolutely absurd to complain that that RFD 26[0] does not have "any meat." This is in fact dense technical content (10,000+ words!), for which I would expect a thorough read to take on the order of an hour. Not that I think you read it thoroughly: you skimmed to parts, perhaps -- but certainly glossed over aspects that are assuredly not your domain of expertise (or, to be fair, of interest to you): postmortem debuggability, service management, fault management, etc. These things don't matter to you, but they matter to us quite a bit -- and they are absolutely meaty topics.Now, in your defense, an update on RFD 26 is likely merited: the document itself is five years old, and in the interim we built the whole thing, shipped to customers, are supporting it, etc. In short, we have learned a lot and it merits elucidating it. Of course, given the non-attention you gave to the document, it's unlikely you would read any update either, so let me give you the tl;dr: in addition to the motivation outlined in RFD 26, there are quite a few reasons -- meaty ones! -- that we didn't anticipate that give us even greater resolve in the decision that we made.
[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026
stonogo|1 month ago
simeonmiteff|1 month ago
It is simultaneously an assertion of the culturally determined preferences of a group of people steeped in Sun Microsystems engineering culture (and Joyent trauma?), and a clinical assessment of the technology. The key is that technology options are evaluated against values of that culture (hence the outcome seems predictable).
For example, if you value safety over performance, you'll prioritise the safety of the DTrace interpreter over "performance at all costs" JIT of eBPF. This and many other value judgements form the "meat" of the document.
The ultimate judge is the market. Does open firmware written in Rust result in higher CSAT? This is one of the many bets Oxide is making.
Frankly, I don't think Oxide would capture so much interest among technical folks if it was just the combination of bcantrill fandom + radically open engineering. The constant stream of non-conformist/NIH technology bets is why everyone is gripping their popcorn. I get to shout "Ooooooh, nooo! Tofino is a mistake!" into my podcast app, while I'm feeding the dog, and that makes my life just a little bit richer.
linksnapzz|1 month ago
It was several assertions, plus your admission of confusion. I mean, there are no stupid questions, but there wasn't even a question there, so I don't blame anyone for thinking you're communicating poorly.
unknown|1 month ago
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