Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 22 Jun 1999 14:04:32 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: Some very thought-provoking ideas about OS architecture. |
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On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Rik van Riel wrote: > > The real issue here is paradigms. The classical "everything's > a file" broke down with the advent of networking, sockets and > non-blocking reads. At the moment the file paradigm is so much > out of touch with computational reality that web servers need > to fork for each client and people are crying out for asynchronous > sendfile and other weird interfaces.
Sure. But I think it's still a valid paradigm to consider "everything is a stream of bytes". And that's _really_ what the UNIX paradigm has been from the first: the whole notion of pipes etc is not all that different from networking.
> A new "everything's a message" WILL fit the current use of computers > though. One simple concept that's good enough for all our > computational needs. And because it _is_ one simple concept, it can > be implemented in a simple, clean and fast way -- unlike the myriad > of different kludges Unix has to overcome the file paradigm...
I disagree.
The issue is not how you get the data from one place to the other: "read()" is as good as way as "rcv()". Message passing is not the issue.
The real issue is _naming_, and that's not going away. The name space has always been the difficult part. And that's where I agree that UNIX could do better: I think we do want to move into a "web direction" where you can just do a open("http://ssss.yyyyy.dd/~silly", O_RDONLY) and it does the right thing.
Linus
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