4 ms·

The UNIX point really resonates with me. I'm writing this post from Haiku (http://haiku-os.org http://haiku-os.org), and it sometimes saddens me to see that a l

The UNIX point really resonates with me. I'm writing this post from Haiku (http://haiku-os.org http://haiku-os.org), and it sometimes saddens me to see that a lot of energy is spent on POSIX compatibility (Haiku is not UNIX, but there's a compatibility layer that allows trivial POSIX software to compile with very few changes, and makes porting larger pieces of software possible). This, of course, has to be done. Otherwise there will be a whole bunch of software future Haiku users will miss out on, and a whole bunch of trivial software the developers would have to rewrite from scratch. Oh, and then it would take way too much effort to port Perl, Python, Ruby, Vim ... These days, "portable software" pretty much means "targets POSIX".

uriel 17y ago
There is a reason Plan 9 dumped PoSix, there is APE ( http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape ) but to properly maintain it would take way more effort than the rest of the OS. And it is becoming even worse, 'all the world is a vax' has become 'all cpus are x86(-64), all the kernels are linux, all the libcs are glibc, and all the compilers are gcc', portability of most software is awful, and auto*hell only makes things much worse.
- krakensden 17y ago
  On the other hand, in that world at least you only have the broken insanity of one operating system/library stack to worry about instead of three or four. ``Not Linux'' is not the same as 'perfect', no matter what the *BSD people say.