I’m no expert, but my take on the situation is that POSIX is a very old, very stable, relatively powerful API. If figure out a workflow that uses only POSIX tools, then you have very high confidence that you can reuse that workflow across any POSIX-compliant environment.
But if it’s just an old api, why is it still in the spotlight? I understand compatibility is important, but I’m almost never hearing half as much about any of the other old apis–can’t even really think of one either
It covers the majority of basic things you need your computer to do and it works practically everywhere. If you target POSIX (and you avoid uncommon features that some systems don’t implement), your program will probably run on Linux, macOS, *BSDs, random OSes you’ve never heard of, Windows (with certain setups), maybe your toaster, etc. It has a lot of inertia behind it at this point.
It’s the baseline of UNIX, with Linux maintaining most compatibility, meaning servers around the world, desktop environments including MacOS and GNU/Linux, gaming machines (including video game consoles like PlayStation and Steam Deck), mobile devices like Android and Apple Devices, mainframe computing systems, embedded systems, so on and so forth. It makes up the backbone of our technology infrastructure. It continues to be iterated on, and is tightly bound with the C programming language and its improvements and iterations.
I’m no expert, but my take on the situation is that POSIX is a very old, very stable, relatively powerful API. If figure out a workflow that uses only POSIX tools, then you have very high confidence that you can reuse that workflow across any POSIX-compliant environment.
But if it’s just an old api, why is it still in the spotlight? I understand compatibility is important, but I’m almost never hearing half as much about any of the other old apis–can’t even really think of one either
It covers the majority of basic things you need your computer to do and it works practically everywhere. If you target POSIX (and you avoid uncommon features that some systems don’t implement), your program will probably run on Linux, macOS, *BSDs, random OSes you’ve never heard of, Windows (with certain setups), maybe your toaster, etc. It has a lot of inertia behind it at this point.
How do you improve upon perfection?
Ohhh, so it’s old but also best by test, this makes it pretty cool then
Because it avoids this
It’s the baseline of UNIX, with Linux maintaining most compatibility, meaning servers around the world, desktop environments including MacOS and GNU/Linux, gaming machines (including video game consoles like PlayStation and Steam Deck), mobile devices like Android and Apple Devices, mainframe computing systems, embedded systems, so on and so forth. It makes up the backbone of our technology infrastructure. It continues to be iterated on, and is tightly bound with the C programming language and its improvements and iterations.