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Programs have features because they are useful. Some features may not fit your view of what the philosophy should dictate, and that's OK. Having a recursive ls

Programs have features because they are useful. Some features may not fit your view of what the philosophy should dictate, and that's OK. Having a recursive ls doesn't bother me for example. Fork-and-exec isn't complicated by threads. Only fork-and-keep-executing is. UNIX doesn't have a naming convention using file extensions. Some of your points are valid opinions that are shared by others, but I don't know how much they have to do with the UNIX philosophy. Some APIs can be improved, sure. And some are being improved. It takes time because of unix's success and most systems' desire to remain backward compatible (especially in source form).

skissane 10y ago
> Fork-and-exec isn't complicated by threads. Only fork-and-keep-executing is. Another issue is that fork-and-exec doesn't work well with languages with complicated runtimes, e.g. multithreaded garbage collection. It forces you to use a lower level language (such as C) to write all the code between fork and exec. An API based on process handles with a separate "start" call to convert a not-yet-started handle into a running process wouldn't have that deficiency. Another issue is that it is very hard to implement robust error handling without race conditions in the fork-exec model. What if the child process encounters an error between the fork and the exec? How does it notify the parent process of exactly what error it got (e.g. "setsid failed"?) You need some sort of IPC mechanism between the child and the parent. And such an IPC mechanism is prone to race conditions. By contrast, the process handle-based API I suggested doesn't have this problem since it doesn't introduce more concurrency into the system than is absolutely necessary. > UNIX doesn't have a naming convention using file extensions. Yes it does. The average Unix system is full of file extensions like .c, .h, .so, .html, etc. Even in Unix V1 file extensions were used as a convention - http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1 http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1 > Some of your points are valid opinions that are shared by others, but I don't know how much they have to do with the UNIX philosophy. Is there a clear definition of what the "UNIX philosophy" is? Is any criticism of Unix systems as actually implemented a valid criticism of the "Unix philosophy"? Or do you want to define the "Unix philosophy" so vaguely as to put it beyond any possibility of criticism?
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  > Another issue is that fork-and-exec doesn't work well with languages with complicated runtimes How are you doing fork-and-exec in a language with a large runtime? You are either using the language-provided APIs to do it, in which case they should document the restrictions on what you can call (and you should follow those), or you are dipping down into the C or system call layer to do your own fork-and-exec, in which case yeah, you still need to keep to the safe list of routines you can call between fork and exec, and you may have extra limitations since you are mucking around underneath your language's runtime (like you may have to unignore signals on your own, close file descriptors, etc). No surprises there. > Another issue is that it is very hard to implement robust error handling without race conditions in the fork-exec model. I don't think it is. You just print an error to stderr (write() is safe to call), and you return a bad error code (fork has built-in IPC for error codes via wait() in the parent). > Is there a clear definition of what the "UNIX philosophy" is? I don't know, ask the person who first invoked that phrase in this thread. They claimed it meant "do one thing and do it well" to them, and then they complained about things that didn't seem related to me (like file extensions, what does that have to do with programs "doing one thing"?).
  - skissane 10y ago
    > > Another issue is that fork-and-exec doesn't work well with languages with complicated runtimes > How are you doing fork-and-exec in a language with a large runtime? You are either using the language-provided APIs to do it, in which case they should document the restrictions on what you can call (and you should follow those), or you are dipping down into the C or system call layer to do your own fork-and-exec, in which case yeah, you still need to keep to the safe list of routines you can call between fork and exec, and you may have extra limitations since you are mucking around underneath your language's runtime (like you may have to unignore signals on your own, close file descriptors, etc). No surprises there. Let's say I am using JNA – https://github.com/java-native-access/jna https://github.com/java-native-access/jna – under Java. It is safe to call posix_spawn from Java code using JNA. It is safe to call the Windows API equivalent (CreateProcess). It would be safe to call the handle/descriptor-based API I proposed. It is not safe to call fork. This is an undeniable deficiency of the fork-exec approach which competing approaches don't have. Furthermore, whatever compensating advantages fork-exec may have, the handle/descriptor-based API I proposed has the same advantages without this disadvantage. > > Another issue is that it is very hard to implement robust error handling without race conditions in the fork-exec model. > I don't think it is. You just print an error to stderr (write() is safe to call), and you return a bad error code (fork has built-in IPC for error codes via wait() in the parent). But that isn't robust. How can the parent process reliably distinguish output sent by the child process prior to the exec from output sent by the child process post the exec? Likewise, how can the parent process reliably distinguish an error return value from the child process prior to the exec from an error return value from the exec'd program? It can't. For truly robust error handling, you'd actually need to do something like this: (1) have a pipe between parent and child process with FD_CLOEXEC set on the child side; (2) the child sends the parent a message "I'm about to exec" before calling exec; (3) the child sends the parent a message saying "exec failed with errno=.." if the exec call fails; (4) if the exec call succeeds, the child process will close its end of the pipe without sending any message post "I'm about to exec". This is my point, actually robustly handling errors in the fork-exec model is quite complex. In a handle/descriptor based API it would be much simpler. (And the above approach using a pipe isn't perfectly robust – what if the child process crashes for some reason between sending the "I'm about to exec" message and actually calling exec()? It is very difficult for the parent process to reliably distinguish that scenario from some failure in the program being exec()'d.)

skissane 10y ago

> Fork-and-exec isn't complicated by threads. Only fork-and-keep-executing is. Another issue is that fork-and-exec doesn't work well with languages with complicated runtimes, e.g. multithreaded garbage collection. It forces you to use a lower level language (such as C) to write all the code between fork and exec. An API based on process handles with a separate "start" call to convert a not-yet-started handle into a running process wouldn't have that deficiency. Another issue is that it is very hard to implement robust error handling without race conditions in the fork-exec model. What if the child process encounters an error between the fork and the exec? How does it notify the parent process of exactly what error it got (e.g. "setsid failed"?) You need some sort of IPC mechanism between the child and the parent. And such an IPC mechanism is prone to race conditions. By contrast, the process handle-based API I suggested doesn't have this problem since it doesn't introduce more concurrency into the system than is absolutely necessary. > UNIX doesn't have a naming convention using file extensions. Yes it does. The average Unix system is full of file extensions like .c, .h, .so, .html, etc. Even in Unix V1 file extensions were used as a convention - http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1 http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1 > Some of your points are valid opinions that are shared by others, but I don't know how much they have to do with the UNIX philosophy. Is there a clear definition of what the "UNIX philosophy" is? Is any criticism of Unix systems as actually implemented a valid criticism of the "Unix philosophy"? Or do you want to define the "Unix philosophy" so vaguely as to put it beyond any possibility of criticism?

jjnoakes 10y ago
> Another issue is that fork-and-exec doesn't work well with languages with complicated runtimes How are you doing fork-and-exec in a language with a large runtime? You are either using the language-provided APIs to do it, in which case they should document the restrictions on what you can call (and you should follow those), or you are dipping down into the C or system call layer to do your own fork-and-exec, in which case yeah, you still need to keep to the safe list of routines you can call between fork and exec, and you may have extra limitations since you are mucking around underneath your language's runtime (like you may have to unignore signals on your own, close file descriptors, etc). No surprises there. > Another issue is that it is very hard to implement robust error handling without race conditions in the fork-exec model. I don't think it is. You just print an error to stderr (write() is safe to call), and you return a bad error code (fork has built-in IPC for error codes via wait() in the parent). > Is there a clear definition of what the "UNIX philosophy" is? I don't know, ask the person who first invoked that phrase in this thread. They claimed it meant "do one thing and do it well" to them, and then they complained about things that didn't seem related to me (like file extensions, what does that have to do with programs "doing one thing"?).
- skissane 10y ago
  > > Another issue is that fork-and-exec doesn't work well with languages with complicated runtimes > How are you doing fork-and-exec in a language with a large runtime? You are either using the language-provided APIs to do it, in which case they should document the restrictions on what you can call (and you should follow those), or you are dipping down into the C or system call layer to do your own fork-and-exec, in which case yeah, you still need to keep to the safe list of routines you can call between fork and exec, and you may have extra limitations since you are mucking around underneath your language's runtime (like you may have to unignore signals on your own, close file descriptors, etc). No surprises there. Let's say I am using JNA – https://github.com/java-native-access/jna https://github.com/java-native-access/jna – under Java. It is safe to call posix_spawn from Java code using JNA. It is safe to call the Windows API equivalent (CreateProcess). It would be safe to call the handle/descriptor-based API I proposed. It is not safe to call fork. This is an undeniable deficiency of the fork-exec approach which competing approaches don't have. Furthermore, whatever compensating advantages fork-exec may have, the handle/descriptor-based API I proposed has the same advantages without this disadvantage. > > Another issue is that it is very hard to implement robust error handling without race conditions in the fork-exec model. > I don't think it is. You just print an error to stderr (write() is safe to call), and you return a bad error code (fork has built-in IPC for error codes via wait() in the parent). But that isn't robust. How can the parent process reliably distinguish output sent by the child process prior to the exec from output sent by the child process post the exec? Likewise, how can the parent process reliably distinguish an error return value from the child process prior to the exec from an error return value from the exec'd program? It can't. For truly robust error handling, you'd actually need to do something like this: (1) have a pipe between parent and child process with FD_CLOEXEC set on the child side; (2) the child sends the parent a message "I'm about to exec" before calling exec; (3) the child sends the parent a message saying "exec failed with errno=.." if the exec call fails; (4) if the exec call succeeds, the child process will close its end of the pipe without sending any message post "I'm about to exec". This is my point, actually robustly handling errors in the fork-exec model is quite complex. In a handle/descriptor based API it would be much simpler. (And the above approach using a pipe isn't perfectly robust – what if the child process crashes for some reason between sending the "I'm about to exec" message and actually calling exec()? It is very difficult for the parent process to reliably distinguish that scenario from some failure in the program being exec()'d.)