Re: docstrings in dired.el

[Richard M Stallman]

    Every modern OS has APIs to access the same information as `ps' does;
    providing primitives to do that from Lisp will make proced.el much
    more portable than it is currently, and I think it will also be
    faster.

I agree this can be cleaner, but if you add clean primitives to get
all this information, it will be a lot of bloat in the C code.  And
since that code will be totally different for different systems, it
will increase rather than decrease the system-specific code.  It will
mean a big addition the Emacs Lisp manual, if we document it.  I think
that these interfaces will never be needed for anything else.

All in all it seems we are better off with what we have now.

A simple primitive that we could document as "get all data about all
processes now running" might perhaps avoid these drawbacks.