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what are you on about? I just gave you the specific examples: timerfd, eventfd, signalfd, inotify... these are all epollable fds in Linux?

Futex is a special case because futexes themselves are quite special. There is no userspace equivalent to them in Windows anyway as has been mentioned. Windows Events are similar to what is provided by eventfd, but not as featureful.

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Probably the core of the issue here is that VMS and derivatives tried to hard to fit everything into a generic handle/fd interface while UNIX historically came with a smaller core with many important API surfaces (like signals or timers) only relatively recently getting absorbed under the unified handle/fd interface, giving the impression it's an afterthought.

It's also not something that works on all Unices (e.g. afaik macos has no timerfd). But in all fairness, that problem only exists because OS speciation, as it's biological counterpart, is not as clear cut a concept as one would desire.

Macos timers can be waited on via kqueue FWIW.

I know; but they cannot be closed with close, or passed via unix domain sockets to other processes etc etc. I _think_ this whole thread is about "purity", whatever that means.

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