4 ms·
I'm guessing the stickiness of Unix is that a lot of useful software, espescially FOSS, just compiles and works on Unix-y operating systems, assuming the right
by eestrada 4y ago
I'm guessing the stickiness of Unix is that a lot of useful software, espescially FOSS, just compiles and works on Unix-y operating systems, assuming the right syscalls are implemented. There is far less reinventing of the wheel by going that route.
- boricj 4y agoImplementing POSIX as a compatibility layer on systems not designed to be Unix-like is possible. You can even skip a fair number of the most problematic parts and still run useful programs. OpenVMS doesn't have fork(), just vfork() and it can run LLVM and modified versions of bash and GCC. Windows NT used to have a POSIX subsystem. Heck, IBM even managed to certify z/OS to be POSIX compliant. Just because you happen to need some level of POSIX compatibility for interoperability doesn't mean that POSIX has to be the basis for your syscall layer.