> An old-fashioned file is not the logical extreme of anything. ... Instead we don't even have a good way to do any kind of networking.
One can take this further. There was a forgotten system called ChiOs which started with "A bit is a file. An ordered collection of files is a file." and went downhill from there.
"Everything is a file" has its limits.
I rather liked QNX. QNX is a microkernel with microservices.
Everything is an inter-process function call. Call, wait for response or timeout.
Works both locally and remotely. Very fast locally. There's a POSIX library, but when you call "read", some glue code makes a call to the file system service.
As a base abstraction, remote procedure calls work better than files. Files implemented via RPC are simple. APIs via RPC work are very similar to local function calls. RPC via a file interface is complicated. You have to put a protocol on top of stream/file oriented sockets to get a message interface.
The point that the author seems to be making is that WASI offers a standard API. It's one that crosses a memory protection boundary, like an inter-process function call. This is a reasonable way to do things. For historical reasons, neither Unix nor Windows supports that approach well.
One can take this further. There was a forgotten system called ChiOs which started with "A bit is a file. An ordered collection of files is a file." and went downhill from there.
"Everything is a file" has its limits.
I rather liked QNX. QNX is a microkernel with microservices. Everything is an inter-process function call. Call, wait for response or timeout. Works both locally and remotely. Very fast locally. There's a POSIX library, but when you call "read", some glue code makes a call to the file system service.
As a base abstraction, remote procedure calls work better than files. Files implemented via RPC are simple. APIs via RPC work are very similar to local function calls. RPC via a file interface is complicated. You have to put a protocol on top of stream/file oriented sockets to get a message interface.
The point that the author seems to be making is that WASI offers a standard API. It's one that crosses a memory protection boundary, like an inter-process function call. This is a reasonable way to do things. For historical reasons, neither Unix nor Windows supports that approach well.