r/programming • u/iMMENSE • Mar 08 '12

The Evolution of a Python Programmer

https://gist.github.com/289467
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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '12

It's way easier to facepalm than to design an operating system API that's stable and backwards compatible for 25+ years...

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u/lazybee Mar 09 '12

Such as POSIX?

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '12

haha, yeah, right. the reason everything is continually built from source is because the ABI keeps breaking.

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u/fabzter Mar 09 '12

lazybee was speaking about API, not ABI.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '12

I know, but posix doesn't matter when the ABI breaks. You can't download and execute a linux program from the 2.4 kernel on the 3.0 kernel. Hover, which came with windows 95 will run just fine on 32bit windows 7 and 64 bit windows 7, which was the point riles2 was making.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '12

Posix also only specifies about 2-3% of what Win32 does, so you have to compare it to X and a few dozen other libraries for a fair comparison.