Posix Abstractions in Modern Operating Systems: The Old, the New, the Missing [pdf] (opens in new tab)

Then we can say it is a rather poor hack.

Not everyone agree those were the good old days.

For me the good old days were the time spend with Amiga 500, discovering the world of Smalltalk, Oberon and all Xerox PARC research and other pioneers.

I got into UNIX via Xenix, and used almost every commercial flavour of it, but don't consider it the good old days.

The fact that POSIX is stuck in a PDP-11 world, is a proof that no big in the industry, with power to drive POSIX forward, is seeing as a relevant OS API for anything besides writing daemons and CLI applications accessible via SSH.

As far as I can tell, POSIX was an attempt to codify existing practice amongst Unix vendors, picking the best of the most widely supported features, as opposed to actually trying to come up with a good standard. From reading UHH, one might almost be tempted to say that the only thing worse than POSIX was leaving things up to the vendors. Either way, POSIX seems to have dealt with a lot of interop issues, but it has fallen so far behind the curve that it hardly even makes sense to talk about. The article compares Android, OSX, and Ubuntu. If you were going to have a conversation about interoperability between those platforms, would you be thinking about POSIX? Or perhaps some web standard?

Standards probably shouldn't sit still, especially if they hew more closely towards existing practice than ideal practice. I think POSIX is overdue for an update.

As an aside though, did people ever voluntarily use csh? Aside from committed masochists, that is.

I would argue passing around all data as text is suboptimal, not only from a performance point of view but also in terms of robustness. Parsing plain text using regular expressions and suchlike can lead to some useful outcomes but it's easy to derive false positives from this. On the other hand a binary-based object-oriented approach can give better performance and make it easier to parse data.

This is just one example of where the old ways aren't necessarily the best. I'm fairly confident we could come up with something better than POSIX if we were willing to make the effort.

The cascade has to continue cascading...