🚀 go-pugleaf

Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se> wrote:
> On 2018-07-15 12:17, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On 2018-07-15 12:03, Huge wrote:
>>> On 2018-07-15, Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se> wrote:
>>>> On 2018-07-15 01:59, Bob Eager wrote:
>>>>> On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 21:22:17 +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Disk directly to buffers in user space in Linux? Sure, it's called 
>>>>>> mmap.
>>>>>> Which, by the way, is more or less a direct ripoff from TOPS-20.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Which was a ripoff from MULTICS and EMAS.
>>>> 
>>>> I'm not sure about that. Multics, from what I read, considered memory
>>>> and files to be the same thing. This is sort of a different idea than
>>>> saying that you can map a file into a specific part of your memory. I
>>>> have no idea how or what EMAS is. :-)
>>>> 
>>>> But the comment about the ripoff goes as far as the Unix mmap API being
>>>> pretty much a copy of TOPS-20.
>>> 
>>> I find the word "ripoff" problematical. Virtually everything in computer
>>> science is based on something else. Thinking "that's a good idea" and
>>> re-using it in a new and interesting way is hardly "ripping off".
>> 
>> If you take the concept *and* API and copy it verbatim, I think calling 
>> it a ripoff is not so wrong.
>> Had they just taken the concept, then I'd say inspired by, or something 
>> similar. But this one goes a bit further. I remember back when Sun 
>> introduced mmap, that I heard (don't remember from where), that they had 
>> looked at TOPS-20 when they did the implementation for SunOS.
> 
> I should probably modify my language.
> For many, "verbatim" is probably hard to justify here. After all, the 
> TOPS-20 PMAP% system call is an API from assembly language, while the 
> Unix mmap() system call is an API from C.

Which, I believe, is just a wrapper for the corresponding Linux SYSCALL.


-- 
Pete