> There's an essay somewhere I remember reading where an ITS hacker looks at Unix for how it handles the interrupted system call problem and comes away horrifie

> There's an essay somewhere I remember reading where an ITS hacker looks at Unix for how it handles the interrupted system call problem and comes away horrified at the discovery that it makes the user do it via EINTR. I think you're talking about Worse is Better: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html > There's no good reason to be catching synchronous signals in modern code In libraries you can never know what the main program will do, and who wants to write a library that says "this library will malfunction if you use OS feature X"? > See signalfd() et. al. That's very cool, I had not seen that! But it's Linux-specific.