[TUHS] Sockets and the true UNIX

[bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2017 09:13:38 -0700 Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
Jon Steinhart writes:
> 
> Maybe this is naive of me, but I have never liked parts of the sockets
> interface.  I understand that at some level it was a political/legal
> keeping the networking code independent of the rest of the kernel.
> >From a technical and historical standpoint, I view it as the tip of
> the iceberg bloating the number of system calls.

In a sense the socket interface is a lower level interface
compared to other syscalls. But complicated by the fact that
it tries to be general.

> In particular, I have often thought that it would have been a better
> and more consistent with the philosophy to have it implemented as
> open("/dev/tcp") and so on.  Granted that networking added some new
> functionality that justified some of the system calls, just not socket().

This is more or less how plan9 networking is done.  Among
other things you can write scripts that can do networking even
though the shell knows nothing about networking.  See
    http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/

The key is to realize that each protocol defines its own
namespace so this fits naturally in plan9.  Allowing services
(programs, kernel or drivers) to define their own namespaces
and making them accessible via a tiny interface to any program
is the main invention of plan9.  Similarly ctl files instead
of ioctls.