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>The UHH is a fun read, yes, but the biggest real-world problem with the Unix Wars was cross-compatibility. Your Sun code didn't run on Irix didn't run on BSD a
by rhizome 7y ago
>The UHH is a fun read, yes, but the biggest real-world problem with the Unix Wars was cross-compatibility. Your Sun code didn't run on Irix didn't run on BSD and god help you if a customer wanted Xenix. OK, you can draw some parallel here between React vs. Vue vs. Zeit vs. whatever
POSIX is a set of IEEE standards that have been around in one form or another since the 80s, maybe JavaScript could follow Unix's path there.
- Jasper_ 7y agoThe existence of such a standard doesn't automatically guarantee compliance. There are plenty of APIs outside the scope of POSIX, plenty of places where POSIX has very under specified behavior, and even then, the compliance test suite doesn't test all of the rules and you still get tons of incompatibilities. POSIX was, for the most part, not a major success. The sheer dominance of Linux monoculture makes that easy to forget, though.
- rhizome 7y agoOf course it doesn't guarantee compliance, but like all standards it makes interop possible in a predictable way, e.g. some tcsh scripts run fine under bash, but that's not by design. The inability or unwillingness of concerned parties to adopt the standard is a separate problem. This is why "posixly" is an adverb with meaning here.