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Comment by stralep | Hacker News Reader

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stralep·

What I like about UNIX: Everything is a file.

Except of processes.

And sockets.

And XWindows.

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You missed the point. This is why he talks about Plan 9. In Plan 9, everything IS a file. Including sockets, and windows, and processes. Several of these features have made their way back into linux.

There's also http://www.glendix.org/

/proc and /dev/tcp

http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/proc.htm...

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/more-using-bashs-built-d...

X is just a protocol, you can happily think about X apps in terms of processes and sockets.

I agree, but this should have been from the start, or at least from UNIX-Internet marriage. My point was little tongue-in-cheek, but I believe that during the years UNIX has got things that are not truly with their initial idea. Or little more interfaces than necessary.

/proc is an attempt to retrofit plan9 ideas back on Linux. Plan9's is far more powerful, because you can control the visibility of filesystem mounts per-process.

That does suggest the idea of implementing a FUSE filesystem that represents all clients connected to the X server (or Wayland). That could be interesting.

As far as I can understand, this was exactly the problem that Plan9 tried to fix. UNIX had started from the concept of "everything is a file", but then as new things got added, those didn't follow the philosophy. Plan9 was an attempt at a fresh start where such non-UNIXisms could be moved back to files.

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