Programming

17492 readers

44 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

221

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

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

270 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

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 11 points 2 months ago (1 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 months ago (1 children)

Are sockets not files?

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 5 points 2 months 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.