[cyberax]

Sockets won over over-engineered monstrosities like STREAMS or X.whatever

And yet, sockets are a terrible interface. They don't provide a way to get the details of the underlying connection for features like migration, checkpointing, or introspection. E.g. there is no way to get the current sequence number for TCP (there is "connection repair" mode now, but it's Linux-specific).

Well, you can say that sockets abstract the low-level details, but then these details hit you in the face when you need to do protocol-specific name resolution.

I now believe that we could have switched to something like IPv6 two decades ago if the socket interface simply allowed binding multiple address families to one socket and handled the name resolution internally.

Sockets also cemented the "one connection - one address" model that is _still_ dragging back the IPv6 adoption. MPTCP or QUIC are still barely supported.