Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 18 Jan 1999 22:48:11 -0800 | From | Dan Kegel <> | Subject | To be smug, or not to be smug, that is the question |
| |
"Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> writes: > Blocking system calls were a bad idea. Signals were added to unix > to address the lack of a general event queue. Since longjump won't > get you out of one of those crummy blocking system calls, some > fool made signals interrupt system calls. As a patch on top of > a patch on top of a patch, app programmers need to wrap system > calls in loops. Patching the brokenness even more, we see Netscape > talking to itself to get around a stupid race condition. Since > the unixy API does not support dispatching concurrent system calls, > someone added the aio_* functions to "fix" it for the limited case > of simple disk IO. All along the way people find hacks for their > own immediate problem rather than fixing the API.
I think he hit a nail on the head somewhere there... a single uniform mechanism for waiting for stuff was what I liked so much about select(), but now I see it isn't up to the task. Sun had a modified select() back in SunWindows days to allow you to wait for UI events, too; I wonder if there's an elegant generalization to select() that could be useful in the future?
Ian McKellar <imckellar@harvestroad.com.au> wrote: > Remeber to use the word "legacy" when referring to NT systems. NT was so > 1995. Linux is the latest-and-greatest thing :)
I don't feel comfortable being so smug, at least in public. Let's underpromise and overperform instead of the other way around.
- Dan -- Speaking only for myself, not for my employer
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |