Post #3806006

@robinp@mastodon.social @fribbledom@mastodon.social This is true, but also ignores all of the software-engineering reality. More importantly: every computer science data structure has a successful loss-free serialisation as a stream of bytes. That's a very useful property, but it ignores the fact that you have to know what that serialisation is. All of the hard parts of building modular systems are related to interface definition. If your interface is 'you take a stream of unknown length of untyped bytes' then you are just punting on all of the hard parts. People need to build protocols on top, and they end up being ad-hoc. I did some work a few years ago to build a generic content-type negotiation protocol on top of pipes in the FreeBSD kernel. I should clean up that diff at some point.