Re: sockets vs. fds

[Melinda Shore <mshore at cisco.com>]

On 12/5/08 10:18 AM, "Dave Crocker" <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:
> It's possible that this represents insight worth sharing broadly,

I doubt that very much, since it's really about API
design and ideological purity and I think has had only
a negligible impact on deployability, but
 
> It isn't immediately obvious to me why file descriptors would have had a major
> impact, so can you elaborate?

I don't think they have.  "Unix" (whatever that means
for the purpose of discussion) was designed around a few
abstractions, like pipes, filedescriptors, and processes,
and by the time IP was implemented we'd pretty much settled
on filedescriptors as endpoints for communications.  We
could do things with them like i/o redirection, etc., and
sockets are something else entirely.  That is to say,
in Unix we shouldn't care whether an input or output
stream is a terminal, a file, or a network data stream,
but because of sockets we do have to care.

Melinda

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