[enriquto]

> can be tricky and limiting for the developer. It is pretty great for the end user however.

This seems to be a great general principle of api design! The best apis are those that are hated by the developer and loved by the end users.

[arghwhat]

> The best apis are those that are hated by the developer and loved by the end users.

No, just those loved by the API consumer. Negative emotions on one end doens't do anything positive.

In the case of plan9, not everything can be described elegantly in the filesystem paradigm and a lot of things end up having really awkward "ctl" files which you write command strings to that the fileserver needs to parse. It also handicaps performance due to the number of filesystem operation roundtrips you usually end up making.

Maybe if combined with something io_uring-esque, but the complexity of that wouldn't be very plan9-esque.

[zozbot234]

> a lot of things end up having really awkward "ctl" files which you write command strings to that the fileserver needs to parse.

These are no different in principle than ioctl calls in *ix systems. The `ctl` approach is at least a proper generalization. Being able to use simple read/write primitives for everything else is nonetheless a significant gain.

[enriquto]

can you give a few examples of this "lot of things"? What operations do not map naturally to file access?