Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by markjdb 531 days ago
The article clearly isn't talking about technical debt within the kernel implementations of epoll and kqueue, and if one wanted, it'd be easy to define fallback EVFILT_READ/WRITE filters using a device's poll implementation.

I don't really understand what argument you're making. Is io_uring also a bad design because it requires new file_operations?
1 comments
ajross 531 days ago
> if one wanted, it'd be easy to

Which, again, is a statement that gets to the root of the idea of "technical debt". You can excuse almost anything like that. It still doesn't make it better than a design that works by default. I remain shocked that this seems to be controversial.

FWIW: io_uring has been very loudly criticized for being hard to implement, maintain and use, via some of this same logic, yes. This isn't a senseless platform flame. Linux does bad stuff too. There are good designs and bad designs everywhere, and io_uring is probably not one (though to be fair it does have some extremely attractive performance characteristics, so I guess one might be tempted to forgive a few warts in the interface layers).

link
markjdb 531 days ago
A design that works by default isn't automatically better either though. You have to look at the details.

> I guess one might be tempted to forgive a few warts in the interface layers

... well, yeah, that's exactly my sentiment about kqueue here. What you're talking about is basically a small wart that no one's bothered to address because it's inconsequential.

link