[TUHS] If not Linux, then what?

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 04:16:18PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Aug 2019 15:40:02 -0700 Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> Larry McVoy writes:
> > and I can tell you that sockets are WAY WAY better.  I get the "it
> > should have just been file I/O" except that I don't.  I tried to 
> > write a library that let you open up /net/tcp/$host:$port and do
> > I/O like it was a file descriptor.  That works for a lot of stuff
> > but I ran into problems quickly.  A networking connection is not
> > a file handle.  You can make some stuff work but I couldn't figure
> > out how to do all of it.   You end up having to do ioctls to handle
> > the stuff that doesn't fit well into the file system name space.
> > I think plan 9 did this sort of thing, maybe Rob can prove me wrong
> > or remember where it didn't match.
> 
> Plan9 does a decent enough job.
> 
> cpu% ls /net/tcp
> /net/tcp/0
> /net/tcp/1
> /net/tcp/2
> /net/tcp/clone
> /net/tcp/stats
> 
> cpu% ls /net/tcp/1
> /net/tcp/1/ctl
> /net/tcp/1/data
> /net/tcp/1/err
> /net/tcp/1/listen
> /net/tcp/1/local
> /net/tcp/1/remote
> /net/tcp/1/status

I dunno.  I can't look at that and know what it means.  So it means I have
to toss (by the time this came out) a decade or more worth of knowing how
to use sockets and learn this new model that may or may not go anywhere.

> plan9 would've been a big improvement over *BSD or Linux. But
> I think a conceptual merge was needed between some sane
> version of Unix and plan9 so as to not throw out all the dusty
> decks.

That would have made a huge difference.  The problem with Unix is it
is largely good enough.  All sorts of warts appeared over the years
but you can get your job done.  Plan 9 was such a big departure that
it never gained traction.  Having it conform to Posix or pick the
most popular Unix (SunOS?  BSD?) and conform to that.  I'm biased but
even if I wasn't I'd have picked SunOS, virtually all open source back
in the day compiled out of the tarball on SunOS.  Everyone else had 
to tinker or run configure or whatever.