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1. Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Mar-2023 04:11:31 JST Adrian Cochrane

   Not only is generating output challenging for a computer, but simply sending messages between different hardware & software components! Even when you don't add compression where the channel lacks necessary bandwidth, encryption where it lacks necessary confidentiality, or error-correction/detection where it's not reliable enough.

   All the same theory applies when storing data to be read later, or when transferring data between computers over the internet!

   1/?

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Mar-2023 04:21:02 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     Simply establishing the communication channel is difficult, spread between Linux itself, the (proprietary) "firmware" beneath it, & userspace components above it. This is challenging because a) a lack of common protocols & more inherantly b) both components want to control the timing. If we value device longevity (which I do!) these problems won't go away anytime soon, we'll just have to live with the complexity the hardware industry shoves on us!

     2/?

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Mar-2023 04:26:50 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     Most of these channels come in the form of datastreams since that's easier to implement especially at a hardware level. Thus necessitating a parser & serializer for any non-trivial processing. Any encryption, error-detection/recovery, &/or (de)compression is typically added at this layer.

     Text parsers are often have a "tokenizer" split to abstract the input data. And "scanners" abstracts the stream to aid peeking at the next item or track linenumbers.

     You can have binary parsers too.

     3/4

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Mar-2023 04:32:34 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     Once we can send messages back & forth, we often need reusable code ("libraries") or even special hardware to help us generate output data. As well as common languages to common languages to communicate with people over, including configuration to respect their culture.

     For some I/O mediums we may use emulators implemented upon another I/O stack, often to cater to device or accessibility constraints.

     An OS consists almost entirely of these complex I/O stacks.

     4/4 Fin!