Having a common entrypoint into the kernel we can hook into is fairly valuable IMO, especially when said interface is for the most part stable between all unx (and to a somewhat lesser extent even on Windows).
Having this lowest common denominator ABI makes interop relatively* painless. But clearly Go wants to eat the world and doesn't seem to care very deeply about this. I suppose it's a valid approach, even if I don't necessarily agree with it.
Could you give any pointers to what is broken about these, and how a better way to do it would be? (I'm thinking about implementing a small system call library interface and I'd like to not repeat the mistakes of the past)
user supplied read addresses -
when a process does a write() it makes sense for it to supply the data as it filled it in. but it almost never makes the same sense for a read(), and using the user address requires a copyout. i'm convinced that having the read() results show up in a kernel-allocated buffer in userspace is a better idea, but this is somewhat subjective
getpwent(), the whole notion of users - we dont use computers the same way we used to in the 70s. talk, write, finger, wall - they aren't very fun anymore since its either just me on my laptop, or one of the 100s of virtual machines floating around. more importantly, the attempts to glue unix system user identity to distributed identities (PAM) have really turned out to be a mess
filesystem permissions - these are clearly insufficient given the number of system-specific addons here.
signals are so riddled with constraints and incompatibilities that they are basically useless - except you have to fiddle with them for things like SIGPIPE
ttys were already kind of broken when they were relevant,
errno is actually a property of the libc, but the status interface is pretty broken - have you even grepped the kernel code to find out what might be issuing an EINVAL?
why dont you mail me at yuri tenuki org? i love these kinds of chats
Having a common entrypoint into the kernel we can hook into is fairly valuable IMO, especially when said interface is for the most part stable between all unx (and to a somewhat lesser extent even on Windows).
Having this lowest common denominator ABI makes interop relatively* painless. But clearly Go wants to eat the world and doesn't seem to care very deeply about this. I suppose it's a valid approach, even if I don't necessarily agree with it.