Unix philosophy

[Laura Creighton]

Interprocess communication is perhaps the greatest weakness of unix.
Most people try to use signals for interprocess communication. this
is like trying to use a wrench to hammer nails home. it will work in
a fashion, but not terribly well, and if you do something wrong you
will break a perfectly good wrench.

everybody and his dog seems to have their own way of dealing with
interprocess communication. these days, I think that tunis is 
maybe the way to go. interrupts are converted to messages, and
there is message handling in the kernel. Unfortunately, this is
not unix. It is too bad that interprocess communication was a very
new idea when Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were designing the
first unix.

All the other attempts to get interprocess communication seem like
the proverbial 'tacking a bag on the side of a ...' Very ugly.

I think that interprocess communication is going to be very important
in the future, but boy do I want one general way of doing it! Not
hundreds. And I do not know the best way to do it. A friend and I ...
no, lets be fair, Geoff Collyer came up with this, i just helped criticise
it until it came into its present form... came up with a rather elegant
and simple way to put semaphores into any unix kernel. (we think. there
hasn't been time to test it, alas.)  But if it does not get used by
the people at Berkeley and Bell and HP and DEC and whereever else
unix development work is being done then it is just a local kludge,
even if it is more elegant and pleasing than the official solutions.

And all local software that uses it will be an albatross on somebody's
neck in the future, something i would not like to inflict on anyone.

laura creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura