# POSIX has become outdated - article in ;login:



## kafka0 (Feb 12, 2017)

Interesting read on whether POSIX is still relevant: POSIX has become outdated.

I find it a bit sad to see how the platform landscape has become fragmented and how cross-platform compatibility now relies on fragile third-party libraries, and I'm not sure what this means to a system like FreeBSD.

What do you think?

Here's the link to the discussion over at Lobste.rs.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 12, 2017)

I read this yesterday in part. Note that they claim POSIX is outdated cause people aren't using it and they're using, instead, other things. So that isn't the reason POSIX, or anything, would be outdated. It doesn't mean POSIX can't do the job. It's just this same mindset I talked about in another thread that people want more explosions and pretty little things while ignoring the science of computers. POSIX is old and part of UNIX, which is even older, so it must be bad.

I saw a statement today where someone complained about some longtime software standards body that is old so, therefore, no longer of any consequence and gave an example of the old stuff. The example is duplicated by a new organization under a new name alone but, to that poster, was somehow better. Cause it's newer. No other reason.

I thoroughly agree about the fragmented, fragile cross-platform complaint. It is rampant for web development. On Stackoverflow, for example, it's often difficult to answer questions cause they no longer are fundamental ones like, "Why doesn't this CSS work?" when looking at it shows they are using two libraries or frameworks and javascript to attempt to accomplish something and, to answer the question, you need to be well-versed in all of them.


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## bcomputerguy (Feb 14, 2017)

drhowarddrfine said:


> I read this yesterday in part. Note that they claim POSIX is outdated cause people aren't using it and they're using, instead, other things. So that isn't the reason POSIX, or anything, would be outdated. It doesn't mean POSIX can't do the job. It's just this same mindset I talked about in another thread that people want more explosions and pretty little things while ignoring the science of computers. POSIX is old and part of UNIX, which is even older, so it must be bad.
> 
> I saw a statement today where someone complained about some longtime software standards body that is old so, therefore, no longer of any consequence and gave an example of the old stuff. The example is duplicated by a new organization under a new name alone but, to that poster, was somehow better. Cause it's newer. No other reason.
> 
> I thoroughly agree about the fragmented, fragile cross-platform complaint. It is rampant for web development. On Stackoverflow, for example, it's often difficult to answer questions cause they no longer are fundamental ones like, "Why doesn't this CSS work?" when looking at it shows they are using two libraries or frameworks and javascript to attempt to accomplish something and, to answer the question, you need to be well-versed in all of them.



This is so true, I come across it all the time. I think the huge influx of new programmers is a great thing but they need to spend some time to learn how a computer works. A new programmer comes in doing some amazing stuff with some prebuilt framework in a weekend, awesome!

Then they want to do something that the framework doesn't offer and don't realize that you have to build it; or at least find another tool that does it but then that leads to the problem you just outlined, how do you make two different frameworks that have different design goals work together.

I think these things will shake out over time. I am taking my time going all the way down to the metal and back up. 

/Don't use this to derail this thread but; I do a lot of quick prototyping with python but then do my other projects in c and assembly. I don't even want to look at C++ codebases;


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## grahamperrin@ (Feb 19, 2017)

Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13621623 and https://columbia.github.io/libtrack/ I found POSIX Abstractions in Modern OSes: The old, the New, and the Missing - YouTube (17 minutes), a presentation by one of the authors of the article.


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## kafka0 (Feb 19, 2017)

Thanks! I must say I find it a bit hard to follow: like you said in the comments on Youtube, the sound very, very low. I'll try again later, though (with my headphones!).


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