Re: streams fopen

From: Henrik Nordstrom <hno@dont-contact.us>
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:41:38 +0100 (CET)

On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Andres Kroonmaa wrote:

> Hey, watch your words, i'm Solaris shop ;)

I am free to express my opinion. Any my firm opinion in this matter is
that the Solaris 32 bit STDIO subsystem limited to fd < 256 is just crap
and seriously crippling the Solaris system for absolutely no reason.

> When I first encountered this issue, I was told by Sun tech with sad
> mode that yeah, sux, but thats invented looong ago that FILE has 8bits
> for FD, and that they are forced to drag this along all the way for
> backward compatibility. He also began shining suggesting 64-bit api.
> Considering binary backward compatibility as crippledness is something
> we owe to linux.

This is not even about binary backward compability. They could easily have
solved the problem in binary backward compatible ways the day SunOS
started to support more than 256 filedescriptors per process, only
requiring certain broken applications and libraries to be recompiled to be
able to use more than 256 filedescriptors. Using binary compability as an
excuse for not doing anything about such silly thing is intentional
crippling of the system in my view.

Using binary compability as an excuse why keeping the default ulimit at
256 is perfectly fine, but not as an excuse why the source level API could
not be updated.

Regards
Henrik
Received on Thu Feb 20 2003 - 01:41:46 MST

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