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 kernels.

Thus, a microkernel-based system, as ours is, has to employ a bunch of detours, for example to implement the fork system call.

On the other hand, (mostly) complying to these standards, made a really big body of software just work without any (or just trivial) 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 to be POSIX compliant.

External

• The Open Groups POSIX Specification
• Wikipedia article on POSIX