Programming

17020 readers

270 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

223

Which protocol or open standard do you like or wish was more popular? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by cyclohexane@lemmy.ml to c/programming@programming.dev

273 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.

The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.

I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lime@feddit.nu 32 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

i'm a plan 9 from bell labs fan. Imagine how excited I was when wsl used 9P for its plumbing. then they scrapped it all for wsl2.

just, the power they managed to get out of those union mounts... your application wants access to the mouse? sure, here's a file named "mouse". it's got the coordinates in it. you want to draw to the screen? here's a file called like "bitmap" or whatever, just write to it. you want to start a process on another machine? just cd to it and start the process there. want to have the UI show up on your machine? symlink your bitmap file to that directory.

I also wish early web composability could have stayed and expanded. like, the old vlc embed player, which would just show up in your browser and could play any file inline? great stuff. Imagine if every application composed with everything else, like the android Activity and Intent concepts but for anything, just by virtue of living in the same os. need an image? just ask the os and it will present the user with many ways to procure an image, let the selected one run , and hand you back an image. you don't even have to care where from. in a way, it's what the arcan guy is doing with his experiments, although that's more for stitching together graphical pipelines.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 11 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Plan 9 even extended the "everything is a file" philosophy to networking, unlike everybody else that used sockets instead.

[–] tatterdemalion@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Are sockets not files?

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 5 points 2 weeks ago

They're "file like" in the sense that they're exposed as an fd, but they're not exposed via the filesystem at all (Unlike e.g. unix sockets), and the existing API is just mapped over the sockets one (i.e. write() instead of send(), read() instead of recv()). There's also a difference in how you create them, you open() a file, but connect() a socket, etc.

(As an aside, it turns out Bash has its own virtual file-based wrapper around sockets, so you can do things like cat a remote port with Bash, something you can do natively in Plan 9)

Really it just shows that "everything is a file" didn't stand up in practice, there's more stuff that needs special treatment than doesn't (e.g. Interacting with TTYs also has special APIs). It makes more sense to have a better dedicated API than a generic catch-all one.