> I might as well repeat myself: choice of strategy depends on the > application. Given choice programmers can decide on which strategy or > combination of strategies works best. Without choice, well, they will just > live with what's available.
this is a very deep philosophical divide between windows and systems like plan 9, and research unix. the approach the labs took was to provide a minimal set of primatives from which one can build what's needed. compare just r?fork and exec with all the spawn variants windows has. i think you're trying to argue that — a priori — choice is good? but given that plan 9 is about having a system that's easy to understand and modify, i would think that it would be tough to demonstrate that asyncronous i/o or callbacks could make the system (or even applications) simplier. i doubt that they would make the system more efficient, either. do you have examples that demonstrate either? > One Right Way" always leaves open the question of whether a different > choice of strategy on the same platform, were a different choice available, > would have yielded better results. clearly if that position is accepted, computer science is a solved problem; we should all put our heads down and just code up the accepted wisdom. that's not the position i subscribe to. and since plan 9 is simple and easy to change, it makes an ideal system for someone who wants to try new things. - erik
