That's true--you can add the ability to seek, in which case the stream becomes like a file. Whether or not that's desirable depends on what kind of programs yo

That's true--you can add the ability to seek, in which case the stream becomes like a file. Whether or not that's desirable depends on what kind of programs you're writing. For programs like databases that traditionally store things using the filesystem, that's probably a very useful abstraction, and some people at VMware have actually implemented an "RDMA over the filesystem" abstraction, which is super cool: https://256fd102-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/mkaguilera/remote-regions-atc2018.pdf https://256fd102-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/mk.... If you're looking for an abstraction with which to directly implement programs that use data structures, however, I still think pointers are much more valuable than files because files are not strongly typed, and it's easy to read junk due to type errors and lack of structure.