[TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

[Andrew Warkentin]

On 2/8/21, M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
> How many of roughly 500 system calls (to say nothing of uncounted
> ioctl's) do you think are necessary for writing those few crucial
> capabilities that distinguish Linux from v7? There is
> undeniably bloat, but only a sliver of it contributes to the
> distinctive utility of today's systems.
>
> Or consider this. Unix grew by about 39 system calls in its first
> decade, but an average of 40
> per decade ever since. Is this accelerated growth more symptomatic of
> maturity or of cancer?
>
> Doug
>

I'd say probably the latter. There's no good reason I can see for the
proliferation of system calls. It should be possible to write a system
where everything truly is a file, and reduce the actual primitives to
basically just (variants of) read() and write(), with absolutely
everything else (even other file APIs such as open()/close())
implemented on top of those. That's my plan for UX/RT. Extreme
minimalism of primitives should make things more manageable,
especially as far as access control and extensibility go.