While I don’t doubt that the author has good reason for their opinion, the reason is handwaved here, no? Where is the tech debt? In the kernel only? Does it affect user space? For
who is it more or less composable?
I personally think ”async IO” (a term I don’t love, but anyway), should be agreed upon and settled across OSs. Not necessarily exact syscall equivalence, but the major design choices needs to be the same. For instance, who owns the buffers (kernel or user), and should it be completion or ready-based event systems?
The reason I think this is so important to agree upon, is that language runtimes (and other custom runtimes like libuv) need to be simplified in order to allow for healthy growth. Any language that doesn’t have cross-platform support for ”async IO” is completely nerfed, increasing the barrier of entry for things that otherwise would be ”graduate level” projects, into deep OS/kernel knowledge that is hard to find outside FAANG and a few other spaces.
I personally think ”async IO” (a term I don’t love, but anyway), should be agreed upon and settled across OSs. Not necessarily exact syscall equivalence, but the major design choices needs to be the same. For instance, who owns the buffers (kernel or user), and should it be completion or ready-based event systems?
The reason I think this is so important to agree upon, is that language runtimes (and other custom runtimes like libuv) need to be simplified in order to allow for healthy growth. Any language that doesn’t have cross-platform support for ”async IO” is completely nerfed, increasing the barrier of entry for things that otherwise would be ”graduate level” projects, into deep OS/kernel knowledge that is hard to find outside FAANG and a few other spaces.