On Sunday, 29 December 2013 at 11:01:05 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
Basic OS level file-system I/O support is useful on its own, especially in a systems programming language. You don't need to pull in a whole bunch of dependencies to read a text file.
Yes, it is useful to have good bindings for OS-level apis. However, Posix is no longer an adequate abstraction for cross-platform file systems. In the cloud or in clusters you mount network drives with other properties than a local drive.
It is much better to encourage a high-level interface for general file access. That encourage a more portable design for an application. That makes porting much easier. Porting software that assumes a local drive to the cloud is tedious.
You don't pull in whole bunch of dependencies. You include the modules you need and they share the same interface. That's a clean design.
The file module reminds me of Perl and old Php, that was ok in the 1990s, but it is the wrong way of creating a file system abstraction in 2014.
If you just want to read and write a file with a specific path there is no reason for using a non-portable interface. Encourage a portable interface and porting to the cloud becomes trivial: you just swap out the context-object.
