POSIX and SUS both define only d_ino and d_name in struct dirent, so there's not really any legacy left. Everything beyond those two values is an extension by t

POSIX and SUS both define only d_ino and d_name in struct dirent, so there's not really any legacy left. Everything beyond those two values is an extension by the implementation. I'm arguing that the implementation in Linux is fundamentally poor. They've actually changed the API for this in the past when they switched system calls from readdir to getdents.