[1718627440]

Is it weirder, that you can pass an variable precisely into argument 4? You do need to pass information to a subprocess and there needs to be some agreement on what means what. Sure, maybe you could use names instead of fds, but that sounds needlessly complicated.

[amluto]

A way to pass a defined list of handles to a subprocess (or a friendly other process) makes sense. Having that mechanism be direct inheritance of those handles with the same numbering as the source is obnoxious.

[jonhohle]

That’s like saying you could use positions to specify function argument access (as in assembly) instead of variable names. File descriptors being numbers that are likely array indexes in a file handle seems like a leaky abstraction. Having a namespace that a parent process share with its children seems like a much cleaner design.