And then you continue with “ But file descriptors are good.”
Which arguably could be one of the points against UNIX IMHO. As opposed to object-oriented interfaces like for example Windows NT, which allows for elegant shells like PowerShell.
Now let the downvotes flow in… ;)
I don't believe "object-oriented" has any concrete meaning, so I have a hard time interpreting what you mean by that. Window's HANDLE * is good though, and I recall in some cases NT made some things handle-based ahead of Linux / BSDs doing so. (e.g. is `NtCreateFile` older than `openat`? Maybe?)
Powershell is nicer than bash, but doesn't PowerShell run on linux? I would think the integration with a proper standard library and language runtime (C#'s, CLR) is more important than what the system calls look like.
No downvote from me :)
So with the example of PowerShell (on Windows), I like that I can actually pass around objects which I then can query for details if I want to, but which can also hide their details if they’re not needed.
In contrast to files (or rather text), where details are always exposed. This is often seen as an advantage as it’s directly “human readable”, but in my experience it often makes for more complex command lines.
As said, both philosophies have their pros and cons, I just don’t see the UNIX one as the one and only truth.
But I generally try to be pragmatic and will happily use Windows or some UNIX derived system (or something else) depending on the use case.
When you say "pass around", what do you mean? Is this some userland struct future syscalls will inspect manipulate? Or are you passing HANDLE * references to an opaque resource?
I very much agree text is bad. :)
Now let the downvotes flow in…
No downvote from me!
I always found UNIX's everything-is-a-bag-of-bytes to be a huge pain, and file descriptors even worse.
This is a hard pill to swallow for many *nix die-hards, but I would say that objectively speaking, Windows NT has a better core OS model than Unix-like OSs, including the driver model, the filesystem API, the process management API[1], and the overall plug-and-play-ness of NT.
[1]: The OP article mentions this paper by Microsoft Research, but claims it doesn't offer alternatives—it does. It explicitly mentions posix_spawn and CreateProcess. https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3317550.3321435
On the surface it seems like madness, but taking a proper look quickly shows there were and are very smart and wise people behind Windows's core.
Microsoft really should push that harder and create some sort of standardized /usr/bin-alike so people can install CLI tools (both local user equivalent to ~/bin and globally requiring admin) in a controlled manner.
PowerShell is an awesome shell.
This is called C:\Program Files.
> ~/bin
This is called %LOCALAPPDATA%, which lives in C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local.
There are exact equivalents to Unixisms on Windows; it's just that Unix developers don't want to use these equivalents.