Post #3806005
2026-07-14 10:10 UTC
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @fribbledom@mastodon.social reminds of reading about.. 9P (?) and the idea of everything as file (sharing devices remotely etc), where they sidestepped the same interface problem. Not sure if that evolution branch arrived at something more formal.
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-07-14 10:12
@robinp@mastodon.social @fribbledom@mastodon.social I'm not really a fan of Plan 9's approach to this. They tried to build structured interfaces by making things directories with individual controls in each file. This causes problems because you often want to send a bunch of commands together (set this set of properties) and there's no way in UNIX / Plan9 of atomically writing to N files. So the work around is to put all of the controls that you need to update atomically into a single file, but then that file has internal structure that isn't introspectable.