Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Sun 29th May 2011 09:42 UTC
It's funny how trying to have a consistent system design makes you constantly jump from one area of the designed OS to another. I initially just tried to implement interrupt handling, and now I'm cleaning up the design of an RPC-based daemon model, which will be used to implement interrupt handlers, along with most other system services. Anyway, now that I get to something I'm personally satisfied with, I wanted to ask everyone who's interested to check that design and tell me if anything in it sounds like a bad idea to them in the short or long run. That's because this is a core part of this OS' design, and I'm really not interested in core design mistakes emerging in a few years if I can fix them now. Many thanks in advance.
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RE[10]: Comment by Kaj-de-Vos
by Alfman on Mon 30th May 2011 05:15
in reply to "RE[9]: Comment by Kaj-de-Vos"
Member since:2011-01-28
It's difficult to understand you without a specific reference to what you mean.
I'm going to take a stab at it and guess that SOAP (the successor to xml-rpc) might be the most popular instance of the type of interface you are alluding to?
http://weblog.masukomi.org/writings/xml-rpc_vs_soap.htm
In ASP.NET, the soap interface is a derivation of the function prototype, therefore, in this instance SOAP hasn't really extended the expressiveness of the function prototype; but in theory the potential is there.
I'd be really interested in seeing good examples of SOAP which have been exploited beyond wrapping regular functions. Anyone familiar with any?
JSON is another popular interchange format for web browsers, often prefered over xml due to more compactness and better correlation to abstract data types.
http://www.json.org/
Kaj-de-Vos, unless I'm mistaken, it don't seem like you have a problem with RPC itself, but with the non-extensible interfaces provided by a C function prototypes.
If this is the case, then I understand. And now I am forced to admit that C function prototypes are not very future compatible.
C++ supports overloaded functions, so you could get away with adding more parameters in the future, but the model breaks down with too many variants, and in any case it would be C++ specific.
How do you feel about languages which permit/require named parameters? The parameters are effectively a hash table. I think it's a future-friendly model, but I await your comments.
RE[11]: Comment by Kaj-de-Vos
by Neolander on Mon 30th May 2011 05:54
in reply to "RE[10]: Comment by Kaj-de-Vos"
Member since:2010-03-08
Kaj-de-Vos, unless I'm mistaken, it don't seem like you have a problem with RPC itself, but with the non-extensible interfaces provided by a C function prototypes.
If this is the case, then I understand. And now I am forced to admit that C function prototypes are not very future compatible.
If this is the case, then I understand. And now I am forced to admit that C function prototypes are not very future compatible.
Interesting. Can you explain why ?
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Member since:
2010-06-09
The best declarative interface is a self-descriptive one. Which has the effect of the metadata specification being woven into the communication. In that case, there is of course still a standard for what the data can look like, but that standard is fixed, like a type system.