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Peter da Silva wrote:
> There's some layering problems [with BeOS]:
>
> 3. The implementation language is tightly bound into the API. Components
> communicate through APIs that are written in terms of C++ classes and
> objects.
No worse than all the bits of Unix API that are defined in terms of C
structs. Dealing with them from some other languages is a gigantic pain
in the arse. In fact, such a pain in the arse that a common solution is
to write a little C layer that understands something sane and translates
it into Unix C struct insanity. Defining something in terms of C
structs is a shitty way of defining it, just as shitty as defining it in
terms of C++ objects, as a C struct is just as poorly defined and
implementation specific.
Take, for instance, the mktime function, which takes a struct as an
argument. The man page defines the struct, but defines it in C syntax.
How about defining it PROPERLY, how the bytes are laid out, so that I
can easily create such a structure in some other language?
Or look at gettimeofday, one argument to which is a struct containing
two longs. Now I have to guess whether long == int, or whether long is
twice as big as an int - because the size of 'long' isn't defined anywhere!
> The file name is the one apparently inescapable piece of file
> metadata that lives in the inode.
Palm OS, I think, keeps "file" names (really database names) in the
database. All it stores outside the databases is a list of pointers to
databases. This works very well for a small system but obviously
doesn't scale.
> Imagine if we were routinely putting more metadata in the file
> system rather than in things like magic numbers and structured
> files.
Mmmm, structured files. I wonder how those structures would be defined.
--
David Cantrell | Reality Engineer, Ministry of Information
There are many different types of sausages. The best are
from the north of England. The wurst are from Germany.
-- seen in alt.2eggs...
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