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118 points ashvardanian | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.305s | source
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jchw ◴[] No.42175191[source]
io_uring and Linux's many different types of file descriptors are great. I mean, I personally think that the explicit large API surface of WinNT is kinda nicer than jamming a bunch of weird functionality into files and file descriptors like Linux, but when things work, they do show some nice advantages of unifying everything to some framework, ill-fitting as it may sometimes be (Though now that I say this, it's not like WinNT Objects are really any different here, they just offer more advanced baseline functionality like ACLs). io_uring and it's ability to tie together a lot of pre-existing things in new ways is pretty cool. UNIX never really had a story for async operations, something I will not fault an OS designed 50 years ago for. However, still not having a decent story for async operations today is harder to excuse. I've been excited to learn about io_uring. I've learned a lot listening to conference talk recordings about it. While it has its issues (like the many times it (semi-?)accidentally bypassed security subsystems...) it has some really cool and substantial benefits.

I'll tell you what I would love to see next: a successor to inotify that does not involve opening one zillion file descriptors to watch a recursive subtree. I'm sure there are valid reasons why it's not easy to just make it happen, but it feels like it will be a major improvement in a lot of use cases. And in many cases, it would probably fix the dreaded problem of users needing to fight against ulimits, especially in text editors like VSCode.

I don't have anything of great substance to say about the actual subject of the article. It feels a bit late to finally get this functionality proper in Linux after NT had it basically forever, but any improvement is welcome. Next time I'm doing something where I want to wait on a bunch of FDs I will have to try this approach.

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1. PhilipRoman ◴[] No.42182020[source]
Regarding your point about inotify: it's hard to put this in words, but I feel like there is a need to be able to manipulate file trees more explicitly. Right now the directory abstraction is mostly just a list of lists, and it works fine, but it has problems w.r.t. atomicity and sometimes performance.