this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
160 points (96.0% liked)
Technology
59342 readers
5108 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nice to see a pro NT article for a change but there are some details wrong
"It’s true that Unix has attempted to shoehorn other types of non-file objects into the file system"
'Everything is a file' was Unix's design principle from the very start. It wasn't shoehorned in. It is IMO superior to NT's object system in that everything is exposed to the user as the file system rather than hidden behind programming api's.
I'm not a kernel dev, but I've read often enough that there are some places where "everything is a file" somewhat breaks down on Unix. (I think /proc and some /dev)
For an "absolutely everything is a file" system have a look at plan9, it was the intended successor to Unix, but then that got popular while plan9 stayed a research project.
I know about 3 people on earth that ever ran it in anything approaching production. Two of them still found a way to use the acme editor til LSPs took over, one is still at it.
It remains a pretty cool project you can still find people maintaining the bones of it. I think the core utils are ported and in the arch repo.