relaunchd: a portable clone of launchd

[Hubbard Jordan]

> On Jan 12, 2016, at 4:59 AM, Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I highly recommend to Google for "Mach IPC sucks" if reader is really interested.

And here we return to the usual trap…

“Mach IPC sucks!”

“OK.  What do you propose that will address all of the same concerns?”

“dbus!”

“*Sigh*.  You haven’t even looked at the two technologies in any depth, have you?  Go read the dbus wikipedia page, at least!  Unix domain sockets underneath, no kernel<->userland communication path, no trusted IPC mechanism, no support for large messages…”

“OK, so something new!!  We should totally create an IPC for the New Millennium!”

“That would be you then?  Where’s your white paper?  Where’s your reference implementation?”

<crickets>

Sorry.  Been there, had this debate, and while it’s always extremely easy to fling poop at an existing mechanism, it turns out it’s so much harder to actually *create an alternative* that this kind of discussion only serves to throw cold water on evolution (“the perfect being the enemy of the good enough”) and the end-result is that evolution does not occur.

I also already covered how it’s very easy to layer something like XPC *on top* of Mach IPC such that you, the programmer, need never be exposed to the Mach IPC APIs (but still get to leverage the internal capabilities I’ve already covered).

Sorry, Konstantin, but yours is a non-argument.

- Jordan