Re: Some very thought-provoking ideas about OS architecture.
david parsons (o.r.c@p.e.l.l.p.o.r.t.l.a.n.d.o.r.u.s)
22 Jun 1999 16:06:16 -0700
In article <linux.kernel.Pine.LNX.4.03.9906222222210.4395-100000@mirkwood.nl.linux.org>,
Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org> wrote:
>[I've thought about this long and hard and I've finally come
>up with a proper response to Linus' argument]
>
>On 20 Jun 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>> In short: message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS
>> is just an excercise in computer science masturbation. It may
>> feel good, but you don't actually get anything DONE. Nobody has
>> ever shown that it made sense in the real world.
>
>It's not about physical message passing in the actual implementation,
>what's really happening can be 'hidden' by clever programming by the
>people who built the OS.
>
>The real issue here is paradigms. The classical "everything's
>a file" broke down with the advent of networking, sockets and
>non-blocking reads.
I think you're going to have to enumerate some of the cases
where ``everything is a file'' broke down, and then you're
going to need to enumerate some of the reasons why ``everything
is a message'' is not exactly the same as ``everything is a
file'' (aside from ``message'' being spelled differently
than ``file'', which most people have already figured out.)
____
david parsons \bi/ Skeptical.
\/
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