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Yeah, I've spent a lot of my career supporting cross-platform software and pretty much all problematic cases were because POSIX fanboys wrote the software and t
by izacus 4y ago
Yeah, I've spent a lot of my career supporting cross-platform software and pretty much all problematic cases were because POSIX fanboys wrote the software and then tried to shim themselves onto macOS and Windows while refusing to rethink their approach.
A lot of issues disappeared when better abstractions were found on top of POSIX.
- screamingclay 4y agomacos is posix compliant though
- izacus 4y agoSo is Windows (certified even!), which is exactly my point. It's not a practical and useful abstraction. If anything, it's even more problematic, because Windows is "wierd" and people go out of their way to create special approaches to handle it. For macOS, too many developers think it's "just posix, ya know, like Linux" and then walk into horrible compatibility edge cases.
- tpush 4y ago> So is Windows (certified even!), which is exactly my point. AFAIK, only the versions of Windows that included the POSIX subsystem were certified, the last one being NT 4.0. Long time ago.
- mort96 4y ago> POSIX fanbois That's a weird and derogatory way to talk about people who appreciate having a standard which makes it easier to write cross-platform software. EDIT: To expand on this comment and make it more productive. You're right. If the goal is to have first-class support for both Windows and POSIX-like platforms, the right approach is to have an understanding of what your software needs to do, what the POSIX APIs make easy, and what the Windows APIs make easy, and build abstractions which make sense based on that. But man, do I appreciate that if first-class Windows support isn't top priority, I can support essentially every other widely used platform in the world (including macOS) by just writing against the POSIX API, and I can even get okay-ish Windows support by using a POSIX compatibility layer on Windows. So my point isn't, "People who want to have first-class Windows support but do so through POSIX compatibility shims are doing it right".
- fluoridation 4y agoIt's not cross-platform if the only platform you support is POSIX.
- mort96 4y agoPOSIX is a standard, not a platform.
- chasil 4y agoThere was only one platform designed to be POSIX in all respects, the OSF/1 UNIX for the Alpha processor from Digital Equipment Corporation. It was first known as DEC OSF/1, then Digital UNIX, then Tru64. Previous to OSF/1, DEC had sold Ultrix, first on VAX, then on MIPS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru64_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru64_UNIX The wiki says that OSF/1 was first released for MIPS, but that was before my time, and it wasn't supported for long. I did use Ultrix on MIPS DECStations in college. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix
- growse 4y agoPOSIX is not a platform.
- izacus 4y ago> That's a weird and derogatory way to talk about people who appreciate having a standard which makes it easier to write cross-platform software. When I say "POSIX fanbois" I mean "fanboys" (people that are unreasonably attached to this standard and try to use it everywhere without being level-headed about its usefulness). That probably doesn't include the people who actually wrote the standard, which are all (in my experience) pretty reasonable and realistic about the limitations of things they've created.
- rat9988 4y agoUnless my english fails me. The sentence you are answering isn't about people who wrote the standard?