Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Nit

[Colin Walters]

On Sat, 2003-10-18 at 22:43, Tom Lord wrote:
>     > From: Colin Walters <address@hidden>
> 
>     > It would be way better to just make libarch be friendly to
>     > wrapping by other programming languages.  
> 
> I wonder what I can do to disabuse you of this mistaken notion.

Respond to my arguments against it, instead of saying stuff like:

> Hmm.   Why do we have processes at all?   Why not just run everything,
> os to apps, in one big process?

This is your argument??  

Obviously you know why we don't run everything in one process.  But
let's go through the two major reasons that come to mind:

1) One program can be reading from a disk while another is waiting for
input
2) Unrelated programs can be kept in separate address spaces, so my word
processor crashing doesn't affect my database

Neither of these apply to wrapping libarch, because the whole idea of
the wrapper *is* to be tightly integrated with libarch.  For example, in
a Python wrapper I'd like to be able to convert errors into Python
exceptions.  Exceptions are a *much* nicer way of dealing with error
situations.  Doing this with a subprocess would entail trying to keep
track of state in the wrapper and restart the library subprocess with
that state so that the program could sensibly continue after handling an
exception.

Another reason is that passing structured data around is difficult over
a pipe, but works a lot better in the same process.

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