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POSIX wasn't designed, per se. It's a standard, a lot of which was the codification of existing practices on operating systems where the C language was the pri

by JdeBP 10y ago

POSIX wasn't designed, per se. It's a standard, a lot of which was the codification of existing practices on operating systems where the C language was the primary language. Also note the existence of FORTRAN language bindings, and the low level but persistent rumbles about C++ language bindings that have continued for the past 20 years or so. Then note the number of languages where the doco tells you all about how "we wrap the C library", but what is actually there is in effect a language binding for POSIX for that language.

bluejekyll 10y ago
Yes, you are completely correct. And 'designed' was perhaps a poor word choice. In terms of wrappers of POSIX, I'm definitely not saying that POSIX is dead and not used. It's great that it is a beginning point for porting to various platforms. What I was more pointing out is that as a developer, its your stdlib's portability that is key. For example, many languages use POSIX interfaces where they can, and then switch to platform specific interfaces where necessary, for performance or other reasons.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
"POSIX wasn't designed, per se. It's a standard, a lot of which was the codification of existing practices on operating systems where the C language was the primary language." That's what I was going to say about UNIX, C, and POSIX. The UNIX and C languages' made tradeoffs specifically oriented around the weak hardware they had. We no longer need those. POSIX evolved from a bunch of competing vendors doing a mix of justifiable and weird stuff with a standard trying to abstract it all. It's inherently going to be worse than a clean design over the smaller number of modern UNIXen without all the politics that went into POSIX. And then we have fact that many portable apps need to run on Windows, Mac, iPhone, etc POSIX ranged from useless to lacking platform-specific capabilities on these. So, a clean-slate design covering each of these platforms is the obvious solution. Fortunately, we have a bunch of them with varying styles and tradeoffs to choose from. :)

by JdeBP 10y ago

bluejekyll 10y ago

Yes, you are completely correct. And 'designed' was perhaps a poor word choice. In terms of wrappers of POSIX, I'm definitely not saying that POSIX is dead and not used. It's great that it is a beginning point for porting to various platforms. What I was more pointing out is that as a developer, its your stdlib's portability that is key. For example, many languages use POSIX interfaces where they can, and then switch to platform specific interfaces where necessary, for performance or other reasons.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

"POSIX wasn't designed, per se. It's a standard, a lot of which was the codification of existing practices on operating systems where the C language was the primary language." That's what I was going to say about UNIX, C, and POSIX. The UNIX and C languages' made tradeoffs specifically oriented around the weak hardware they had. We no longer need those. POSIX evolved from a bunch of competing vendors doing a mix of justifiable and weird stuff with a standard trying to abstract it all. It's inherently going to be worse than a clean design over the smaller number of modern UNIXen without all the politics that went into POSIX. And then we have fact that many portable apps need to run on Windows, Mac, iPhone, etc POSIX ranged from useless to lacking platform-specific capabilities on these. So, a clean-slate design covering each of these platforms is the obvious solution. Fortunately, we have a bunch of them with varying styles and tradeoffs to choose from. :)