Re: [dev] convergence

From: Sam Watkins <sam_AT_nipl.net>
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 21:25:15 +1100

On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 11:08:45AM +0100, uki wrote:
> There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in
> ten thousand lines of C.

Agreed. However bash is abominable, and even plain Bourne shell is
fairly hideous. I hear `rc` is decent. C is mildly decent at heart.

I desire to include some useful missing features into C preprocessors and runtime libraries:
  - a compact syntax for pipes
  - a light syntax for calls ( verb noun noun ... , like the shell )

and maybe
  - coroutines, for ultra-light sub-processes
  - a scheduler and coro process manager, for IO

So, I could use C directly as a shell, and coding in C could be as
compact as coding in shell script.

The coroutines / scheduler seems like an OS within an OS, but unix processes
are fairly heavy. It can be good to have many smaller processes that
need use only a few bytes for a program counter and some local
variables, and switch with minscule overhead.

I guess I'm really saying that paged memory protection sucks when trying
to build large processes out of tiny processes and pipes.

Sam
Received on Wed Jan 02 2013 - 11:25:15 CET