[TUHS] Unix APIs: elegant or not?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2018, Pierre DAVID wrote:

> Do you *really* think that IPC System V primitives are better than 
> sockets?

Nope; they're even worse, which I didn't think was possible.  The one 
saving grace (IMHO) of SysV was the TTY driver and its cleaner interface.

I did see a proposal a while back (can't remember where/when) to use 
something like open("/dev/net/host/port", ...) to establish a network 
connection (or a server with appropriate flags), in much the same way that 
device files are created dynamically.

With Unix, everything looks like a file, but as I said, the sockets API 
broke that convention, forcing users to work at a much lower level than 
necessary.

I suppose that around now someone will say that Plan 9 fixed all that :-)

-- Dave