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> for instance, Linux handles network socket, special files (like /proc/cpuinfo) or even USB devices as files. This is a powerful idea that can make easy to write or use programs for linux since we can rely in a set of well known operations from this abstraction called file.

Benno Rice gave a fantastic talk a few years ago called "What UNIX Cost Us," which he starts off by showing how to write some USB device code in macOS, Windows, and Linux. It only takes a few minutes to demonstrate how pretending that everything is a file can be a pretty poor abstraction, and result in far more confusing code, which is why everyone ends up using libusb instead of sysfs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM#t=134s

[DarkUranium]

The same is visible in having to parse a bunch of Linux's more complex of the /proc entries, vs. simply using syscalls in (say) FreeBSD.

"Everything is a file" is not a bad abstraction for some things. It feels like Linux went the route of a golden hammer here.

[favorited]

That's the gist of his whole talk – that doing things "the UNIX way" (which can be defined to various degrees of specificity) has been cargo culted, and that we should reexamine whether solutions that were pragmatic 50+ years ago is still the best we can do.

The specific reason I mentioned it was because his initial example was about how much more ceremony and boilerplate is needed when you need to pretend that USB interfaces are actually magic files and directories.