OpenRC vs runit

OpenRC follows the UNIX philosophy of 'do one thing and do it well', while it's true that it has more features than sysvinit, it does not stay away from its primary function with unnecessary added features.

All configuration is done via shell scripts and symlinks. Shell scripts can then use various specialized utilities to ease the development of init scripts.

OpenRC builds on top of sysvinit and adds some more useful features (like parallel booting) while still the simplicity that sysvinit is know for. Because of this it generally boots faster than other init systems, especially when parallel booting is enabled.

Does one thing and does it well.

Using OpenRC does not lock in a distribution by providing specific NON-POSIX extra services which programs then would rely on.

Basically OpenRC doesn't replace SysV init, but rather works with it, providing features that SysV is lacking while taking advantage of its benefits. It's also used by a fair amount of reasonably popular distros and is well supported and developed.

Uses multi-core and ram very efficiently.

It can be ported to other UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.

I can add a new startup script for most cases in under five minutes. The ability to quickly insert new applications into the system is a big help.

It always initializes a system the same way; if OpenRC booted and ran a system properly today, it will boot and run properly tomorrow, and the next day.

After the system's one time tasks (stage 1) are done, the system services are started up in parallel. The operating system's process scheduler takes care of having the services available as soon as possible.

One of the runit project's principles is to keep the code size small. As of version 1.0.0 of runit, the runit.c source contains 330 lines of code; the runsvdir.c source is 274 lines of code, the runsv.c source 509. This minimizes the possibility of bugs introduced by programmer's fault, and makes it more easy for security related people to proofread the source code.
The runit core programs have a very small memory footprint and do not allocate memory dynamically.

Simple scripts linked to the proper directory is all that's needed to bring a service up at boot, and everything is up and running quickly.

UNIX philosophy, easy to add new services, easy to manipulate, really fast.

Myself included. Development is no longer stalled.

Faster on older systems, especially those running on HDDs.