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.