It's the job of the operating system to provide a stable foreign function interface, and dynamically linked libraries to access common operating system apis tha

It's the job of the operating system to provide a stable foreign function interface, and dynamically linked libraries to access common operating system apis that aren't covered by system calls. Smallest surface area??! There's no excuse for Unix forcing you to use the fractally complex sucking chest wound of ioctl and brittle binary raw pointerless C structures in memory, instead of simply calling functions and passing normal parameters and pointers and results in and out. Computers are great at and have a long history of calling functions, so why not just support that, huh? "Everything is a file" is pointlessly performative but hopelessly incomplete Bauhaus Minimalism that fails to reduce but instead multiplies and relocates all the complexity to the Brutalist Rawness of ioctl's uncanny leaky abstraction of a kitchen sink, which undermines the entire Unix presumptuous philosophy of simplicity and consistency.