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A comment on Rust/WinRT Public Preview. Parent comment

Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview by wongarsu on Thursday April 30, 2020 @09:31PM (#23038243)
Windows NT used to have a POSIX subsystem [1] that applications could use instead of the Win32 subsystem. So the Windows NT kernel is designed with the option of POSIX compatibility. Arguably the Subsystem for Linux is the current successor of the POSIX subsystem, providing POSIX compatible access to the kernel along with a POSIX compatible shell and UNIX commands.

Obviously the Win32 subsystem isn't POSIX compatible, but I'm not sure why we would want that.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

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Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview by jacobush on Friday May 01, 2020 @01:18AM (#23039338)
That subsystem was just so they could tick off the “POSIX” box for Department of Defence.
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Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview by pjmlp on Friday May 01, 2020 @05:06AM (#23040323)
That was one of many, then came SFU, followed by SUA.

GNU/Linux users should be happy that old Microsoft didn't bother to do that much with POSIX subsystem.

Had they actually invested into keeping it up to date, and many of us on PC land would never bothered with FOSS UNIX clones.

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Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview by jacobush on Friday May 01, 2020 @05:14AM (#23040363)
Yeah, that may be true, but on the other hand, had they made it useable, portabilith with other Unix would have been a simpler option.

Simpler than Win32 + Unix portability in any case. Or in some cases, software would have been ported to Win32 at all.

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Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview by pjmlp on Friday May 01, 2020 @08:03AM (#23041185)
What UNIX portability?

Back when I was in the university, and Linux kernel was still at 1.0, I had the pleasure to write C and C++ code across Xenix, DG/UX, Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, BSD and naturally Linux also.

There is POSIX, there is what each OS actually do for the implementation defined behaviours, then the whole set of APIs that made each UNIX variant unique and were the selling point of the UNIX clone to start with.

Autoconf and friends did not start out of masochism.

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Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview by DeathArrow on Friday May 01, 2020 @07:57AM (#23041155)
>Yeah, that may be true, but on the other hand, had they made it useable, portabilith with other Unix would have been a simpler option.

That's not necessarily the case. See macOS which is using different GUI libraries, Metal instead of Vulkan etc.

So you can't recompile macOS apps to use them on Linux.

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Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview by DeathArrow on Friday May 01, 2020 @07:54AM (#23041142)
People forgot that Microsoft was one of the biggest UNIX vendors with Xenix and for a long time, Microsoft had the highest-volume AT&T Unix license.
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