There is something impressive about Lennart’s work, in that treads a thin line between “completely triggering” to some people and “genuinely quite a good idea” to others.
Lots of discussion here has been around the choice of JSON as a format, with some valid points being brought up about specific limitations and possible footguns.
But these miss the point: this massively moves the needle with regard to lowering the barrier to entry when writing services. I’m confident I can write a simple Varlink service in about 20 lines of Python, with no dependencies after reading the linked docs. You cannot in good faith say the same thing about dbus.
That’s nuts. Yeah - if my service is for some reason sending/receiving high-precision 128 bit numbers or huge binary files then it’s not perfect.
But nothing really does that. It’s not worth making the entire stack more complex and less performant for a possible use case that doesn’t really fit.
He's living churn. It's just constant change often for gains that don't matter to a lot of people and losees that do. Linux is radically different because of him. People were deeply invested in how things were. Think about how hard it is to learn a laguage as an adult compared to when you're a kid. Even when some of his stuff is amazing, it's still going to cause stress for a lot of people due to its radical nature.
Lots of discussion here has been around the choice of JSON as a format, with some valid points being brought up about specific limitations and possible footguns.
But these miss the point: this massively moves the needle with regard to lowering the barrier to entry when writing services. I’m confident I can write a simple Varlink service in about 20 lines of Python, with no dependencies after reading the linked docs. You cannot in good faith say the same thing about dbus.
That’s nuts. Yeah - if my service is for some reason sending/receiving high-precision 128 bit numbers or huge binary files then it’s not perfect.
But nothing really does that. It’s not worth making the entire stack more complex and less performant for a possible use case that doesn’t really fit.