Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> On the other hand, I would happily sing your praises, if you invented another kind of pipe, to your specs, it sounds like a great additional

Already exists - Unix domain sockets. Some shells (in particular some versions of ksh) use them to implement pipes. And, on some platforms (Linux yes, but I think maybe not macOS???) Unix domain sockets support record-oriented operation (SOCK_SEQPACKET). The problem is that for it to work you don’t just need the kernel to support it and the shell to use it, you also need all the utilities to support it too-that’s a big ask.

The idea has been implemented on IBM mainframes (CMS pipelines aka Hartmann pipelines). But that’s a radically different platform, and IBM has never tried porting that to a non-mainframe platform, and nobody has ever sought to directly clone it (although stuff like PowerShell and NuShell share some of its ideas, albeit none of the details)




Hmm. Shame it never caught on in the OSS/GNU world.

Thanks for the FYI.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: