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Imagine interoperability nightmare when we cannot rely on everything being just bytes being streamed. I mean, everything would be stored and transmitted one ti
by hamilyon2 7y ago
Imagine interoperability nightmare when we cannot rely on everything being just bytes being streamed.
I mean, everything would be stored and transmitted one time or another. Word document, sqlite database, an email and it's attachment. Imagine you could not send something as simple as word document because ip protocol assumes stream of bytes, and your operating system talks custom storage format. Imagine you cannot store, use sqlite database efficiently because operating system does not present you with efficient, fast, compatible byte storage.
- vcavallo 7y agothere would still be streamable bytes at the bottom, as the author explained..
- hhas01 7y ago“ Imagine interoperability nightmare when we cannot rely on everything being just bytes being streamed.” As I’ve noted above, the problem isn’t transmittability; the problem is never knowing what the bytes being transmitted represent. I mean, C is hardly renowned for the robustness or expressivity of its “type” system, but untagged untyped byte streams are tantamount to declaring all data as void*. That is a ridiculously shaky foundation to build on, yet could have been entirely avoided by simple addition of one more piece of metadata and an ftype() API. K&R were brilliant, but also kinda dumb. I certainly wouldn’t want to eat chicken cooked by either one.
- pdimitar 7y agoI think the author was more advocating for having something like sqlite being a part of the kernel and the de facto way of accessing a lot of data (as opposed to files and directories and byte streams in general).