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by amelius 4122 days ago
I guess you found another issue with Unix. The user does not care in general how something is performed, just that it is performed correctly and with good performance.

I guess an OS should be functional at its interface to the user, and only imperative deep down to keep things running efficiently.

However, note that this hypothetical functional layer on top also would ensure efficiency, as it enables lazy evaluation. This type of efficiency could under certain circumstances be even more valuable than the bare-metal performance of system programming languages.
1 comments
valarauca1 4122 days ago
>The user does not care in general how something is performed, just that it is performed correctly and with good performance.

This is the crux of the matter. With BASH scripting the user does care how a task is preformed as that task maybe system administration, involve sensitive system components, OR sensitive data.

Lazy evaluation is great for binary/cpu level optimization. But passing system administration tasks though the same process is scary as you lose the 1:1 mapping you previously had.

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amelius 4122 days ago
Well, in any case, the problem can be resolved by adding a kernel-level api function that allows one to wait (block) until results are requested from the other end of the pipe.
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valarauca1 4122 days ago
Why?

The opposite is already true and has the same effect.

Each stage of the pipeline is executed when it has data to execute. So ultimately the main blocking event is IO (normally the first stage in a pipeline). Every other process is automatically marked as blocked, until its stdin is populated by the output of the former. Once its task is complete it re-checks stdin, and if nothing is present blocks itself.

So the execution of each task is controlled by the process who's data that task needs to operate.

In your system why would you want to block the previous step? This would just interfere with the previous+1 step, and you'd have to populate that message further up the chain. This seems needlessly complicated. As you have to add extra IPC.

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amelius 4122 days ago
Why: consider the generation of a stream of random numbers; assume each random number requires a lot of CPU-intensive work; obviously, you don't want to put unnecessary load on the CPU, and hence it is better to not fill any buffer ahead of time (before the random numbers are being requested).
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JoeAltmaier 4122 days ago
There are arguments for supply-driven processing, AND for demand-driven. It all comes down to latency and speed arguments.
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