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Old 11th December 2013
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Carpetsmoker Carpetsmoker is offline
Real Name: Martin
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Netherlands
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I don't think that writing a whole new set of tools really solves anything, IMHO The `hey, this could be better, let's just make a whole new application/api and throw the old one out'-attitude is seldom useful. Actually making the existing solutions better is almost always the best thing to do, there are exceptions to this of course, and sometimes there is no one `golden' solution, but more often than not the differences are minor and don't really matter.

A simple example might be epoll vs. kqueue, they both do the same thing, and AFAIK there's no real functional difference between them.
kqueue was there a couple of years earlier, but for some reason the Linux devs opted to create epoll. Perhaps they had good reasons for that, perhaps not, but the situation 12 years later is that we need to use a wrapper if we want to support both FreeBSD & Linux.
Later someone created inotify, which does pretty much the same as epoll & kqueue, with minor differences/improvements, further complicating matters.
And that's just Linux & FreeBSD, other systems may use yet another solution...
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