26 Mar
2017
26 Mar
'17
9:49 a.m.
On Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 11:11 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
I can't wait to see how you all fit remote
procedure calls into a file
paradigm.
I don't mean to sound flippant, but isn't that exactly what every RPC
protocol implemented on top of sockets has done for the last 30 or so years?
I feel like saying otherwise conflates two tangentially related things:
namespaces to name IPC endpoints in a "file" like manner, and an API to
deal with file-like objects as a byte stream on which one uses operations
like read and write. Certainly there is no REASON that sendto() et al can't
be implemented in terms of write(), but arguably the plethora of such as
*system calls* stems from the inability to name them in a way accessible to
open().
The plan9 model is imperfect but serves as the existence proof that it
*can* be done.
- Dan C.