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[[!tag faq/support]]
[[!meta title="POSIX compatibility"]]
Many computer operating systems strive to be POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) compliant, as it makes cross-compiling and program portability much easier than having to package something for every new distribution.
Is it favorable of rather a hindrance to be compatible to POSIX and similar
standards?
A lot of things in POSIX et al. are designed for [[UNIX]]-like systems with
traditional monolithic [[kernel]]s.
Thus, a [[microkernel]]-based system, as ours is, has to employ a bunch of
detours, for example to implement the [[`fork` system call|glibc/fork]].
On the other hand, (mostly) complying to these standards, made a really big
body of software *just work* without any (or just trivial) [[hurd/porting]].
Especially so for command-line programs, and libraries.
But: a large part of today's user programs are not written according to POSIX
et al. low-level interfaces, but against GNOME, GTK+2, and other high-level
frameworks and libraries. It may be a valid option to enrich these instead of
striving for total POSIX compliance -- and the high-level programs (that is,
their users) may not even notice this, but we would avoid a lot of overhead
that comes with wrapping the [[Hurd interfaces|hurd/interface]] to be POSIX
compliant.
# External
* The Open Groups [POSIX Specification](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/)
* Wikipedia [article on POSIX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX)
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