Recent Posts by Ali Bahrami

For years, I worked on an interactive language used by scientists to do data analysis and visualization. That program makes heavy use of sharable libraries. Solaris was my primary development platform, due to its superior facilities for observing and debugging software, so my usual strategy was to write and debug my code under Solaris, and then move the results to the many other Unix (and VMS, Windows, and Macintosh) platforms that we supported. I became very familiar with one...

OpenSolaris is 1 year old today! Congratulations, and thanks to everyone that made it possible! I've used SunOS/Solaris for ~20 years now, for all of the old school reasons: Solaris has long set the gold standard for things like reliability, scalability, observability, debuggability backward compatibility, and standards compliance. Over those years, I've written code that had to run on most versions of Unix as well as VMS, Windows, and the Macintosh. Sun was always the place...

I work on the Solaris runtime linker. One thing you quickly learn in this work is that a small mistake can bring down your system. The runtime linker is an extreme example, but the same thing is true of other core system components. Modifying core parts of a running machine can be a risky game. There is a time honored strategy for dealing with this: Be careful Minimize your exposure Deal with it That's not much of a safety net. "Deal with it" can sometimes be a slow, painful...