> “Over the years, we’ve done lots of nice “extended functionality” stuff. Nobody ever uses them. The only thing that gets used is the standard stuff that every

> “Over the years, we’ve done lots of nice “extended functionality” stuff. Nobody ever uses them. The only thing that gets used is the standard stuff that everybody else does too.” — Linus Torvalds Linus’s quote in the article isn’t really true. It’s true in that small, incremental changes are often ignored in the interest of portability (I’d rather my app worked on both macos and linux so will use generic facilities when at all possible; the system-specific ones may be easier and better but I’ll just have to write something different for the other system. But when the change is a big one, the calculus is different. Consider io_uring: it’s a big win so worth writing special code to use. But the trend in these cases is to write a higher level library , or modify an existing library to work with io_uring. Not a lot of people use system calls directly, except perhaps `stat` and a few other filesystem calls like that. Another case is the procfs, because you can use it directly from the shell.