Are you familiar with Plan 9 or the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol (9P)? It's a simple protocol for representing system resources (any resources, remote or local) as a tree of files. The protocol itself doesn't do much but it can be a common language for all kinds of systems to talk to each other with. It can be very efficient and robust to represent resources as a tree of files and better than the alternative of bespoke protocols and abstractions for every resource. The Plan 9 system uses this abstraction everywhere and it results in a very tightly integrated system that can be more capable than other operating systems with a fraction of the code. And since almost all operations on the system are operations on abstract files it doesn't matter if the files are local or remote to the system :3

I thought you might be interested because web browsers partially arose as a result of the poor integration of systems like Unix or Windows with the internet. But Plan 9 was written from the start as a distributed operating system. I want to write a 9P fileserver for lemmy sometime. I hope this doesn't come across as too rant-like. I got no sleep lol

[–] EatPotatoes@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago

Plan 9 aesthetics are under appreciated. Would often imagine a communist society with plan 9 terminals everywhere when I went through that phase.