perl 5 depends on typeglobs to initialize filehandles, and on local to localize them. However, this does not fall very nicely with Perl's lexical scoping, which makes it necessary to use such modules as FileHandle which behave more lexically, but may not be well-supported.

Rindolf will have a fundamental I/O subsystem which I dub aFile_* after its function names. Generally, this subsystem is not meant to be used directly (albeit it can be) and will be available for those writing low-level file manipulation APIs.

This filesystem will have support for most basic facilities (File I/O, sockets, pipes, ioctl's and fcntl's, asynchronous I/O, etc) and should be flexible enough. Typeglobs will use it, as will all other modules (directly or indirectly) and it will behave in a completely Perl 5-ish manner.