On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 9:24 AM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:

On Jun 16, 2022, at 4:44 PM, George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:
>
> Sockets (which btw, totally SUCK PUS) were coded into things
> and even (YECHH) made POSIX and IETF spec status. Streams didn't stand
> a chance.

The stream abstraction is a nice (c)lean abstraction but it doesn't
quite work for things like multicast or datagrams in general. Plan9
doesn't have sockets but the way it deals with UDP is not simple either.
The complexity is in the protocols themselves. Even at layer 2 (below
the IP layer) the amount of complexity is mind boggling (though I
suppose high-speed backbone switches do all this in hardware!).

I've heard good things about Streams, but never really had a problem with Sockets once I realized that send's and recv's don't necessarily have a 1-1 correspondence.

I do think that Sockets need something analogous to stdio though.

And I believe inetd allowed you to do that.