> On Nov 30, 2016, at 1:13 AM, Tyler Cloutier <cloutierty...@aol.com> wrote:
>> I think we should formally decide that a “nice” wrapper for libc is a 
>> non-goal.  There is too much that doesn’t make sense to wrap at this level - 
>> the only Swift code that should be using this is the implementation of 
>> higher level API, and such extremely narrow cases that we can live with them 
>> having to handle the problems of dealing with the raw APIs directly.
>> 
> 
> I don’t know, I kind of take issue with the last point there. I don’t think 
> it’s a foregone conclusion that applications and frameworks aren’t going to 
> need to be using these APIs.

I respect your opinion, and I agree that it would be “useful” to have a nicer 
wrapper for POSIX.  That said, I stand by the claim that "we can live with 
this”.  We have to pick and choose the battles that are tackled, because we 
don’t have infinite design bandwidth.  Perhaps a better way of saying the above 
would be say that we should “start” with high level APIs, and see how far that 
takes us.  After exploring those and building out the obvious things needed at 
higher levels, we can see what is left unaddressed, and decide then whether it 
makes sense to cover the remaining use cases with a POSIX wrapper or something 
else.

> As I understand it’s not the goal of Foundation to provide all of the 
> functionality of POSIX. And I know of at least 5 serverside and/or networking 
> libraries which each provide their own abstractions over the POSIX interface. 
> Unfortunately I think that breed incompatibility that bubbles up from 
> underneath. 

I agree that this is a huge hole in our story, but fortunately this is one of 
the primary things that the swift server working group is aiming to fix!

-Chris
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