Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by pjmlp on Sunday September 27, 2026 @09:36AM
(#49866553)
Yeah, and one of the ways to show it was a serious OS for DoD projects was to have a POSIX subsystem, which had they kept it around, Linux would never have taken off on the PC, and there would be no need for WSL 40 years later.
Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by tialaramex on Sunday September 27, 2026 @10:07AM
(#49866780)
The POSIX subsystem is a box checking exercise. The reason the box was there isn't satisfied but the box was checked and Microsoft hoped that's good enough. If you need "a Unix" and they give you NT and circle the stuff about POSIX you don't go "Oh, perfect" you ask them to fix the requirements document so that you can have an actual Unix next time.
WSL is Redmond going OK yeah, here you go, an actual Unix.
Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by pjmlp on Sunday September 27, 2026 @01:12PM
(#49868616)
There was also SUA and Interix in the meantime, before WSL came to be.
The point still stands, that POSIX checkbox was relevant enough for spending the money in engineers salary during Windows NT 3.51 development.
Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by someonebaggy on Sunday September 27, 2026 @09:57PM
(#49872682)
It was a requirement on government contract tenders. If you didn't support POSIX, you didn't get the contract and the government would have continued using SunOS or AIX or something instead of Windows NT. Remember that POSIX was designed to make these OSes somewhat interchangeable - they wouldn't order something they knew was incompatible with everything they already had.
Re:C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
by pjmlp on Monday September 28, 2026 @02:47AM
(#49874437)
Exactly, thus UNIX/POSIX being everywhere that mattered, alongside the language created to make UNIX portable, C.
For those that don't read standards, POSIX certification requires the existence of a C compiler, the more recent one being C17 compliant.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/c...
Traditionally this was a profitable niche, Microsoft would like to take a fat piece of that, and instead what happened is that Linux destroyed the profit margin. A million dollars overhead that would have kept a hungry UNIX® vendor alive on your project didn't turn into an extra million dollars on Microsoft's balance sheet, instead it evaporated because Linux is "free". And so then Microsoft lost interest.