[cesarb]

Just look at Mac OS X, which is also from the Unix family. It has the feature of decomposing precomposed characters in file names, so if your software writes a file named "café" (caf\xc3\xa9), and later lists the directory, it will find a file named "café" (cafe\xcc\x81). That tends to confuse software which expects to find a file with the same name after creating it, like for instance git.

For a while, if you were in a team in which some developers were on Linux and others were on Mac OS X, and someone on the Linux side checked in a file named with a diacritic, on the Mac OS X side the file appeared to have been deleted (and a new untracked file with the "same name" appeared). Later git grew special code to work around this misfeature.

And yes, Linux has the "bizarre feature" of being way too permissive. A filename is a sequence of bytes of which only the null byte and the slash are forbidden, and only a single or double dot have special meaning; one can have files named with control characters, and/or with something which is not valid for the current character encoding (LC_CTYPE), leading to pain for languages which insist that a string must be always valid Unicode (this includes Rust).

But yeah, nothing compares to the madness that is forbidding simple names like "nul" or "con" or "aux" (alone or followed by any extension) in every single directory, made worse by the fact that you can create files with these names if you use a baroque escaping syntax (which is not available for every API), confusing every other program which does not carefully do the same.

And let's not forget about the fact that the file you just created might not be readable or writable the next instant, because some other process (usually some sort of "antivirus") decided to open it in a exclusive mode. I've seen several projects add retry loops when opening (or moving, or deleting) a file on Windows, to work around that issue.

[mst]

> It has the feature of decomposing precomposed characters in file names

I was under the impression that the new APFS stopped trying to understand bytes in filenames at all, thereby switching from 'confusion' to [tableflip] as a policy (which is likely an improvement, but also amuses me on the basis it's nice to know [tableflip] is about the only response anybody has to certain unicode-isms)

[Manishearth]

(note that rust just requires the built-in string type to be valid Unicode, you are free to manipulate other kinds of strings, which is exactly how the os string problem is solved. Also gives you a chance to explicitly handle the errors.)

[al2o3cr]

    And let's not forget about the fact that the file you just
    created might not be readable or writable the next instant
    because some other process (usually some sort of
    "antivirus") decided to open it in a exclusive mode.

THIS. Spent quite a long time trying to reproduce a Windows-only bug with the old Rails 2 gem unpacker caused by exactly this; the code would create a directory "foo-1.2.3" and then immediately try to write files to it and fail because of an exclusive lock - on an empty directory.

[int_19h]

Exclusive mode is useful when used for good reasons - i.e. to get snapshot semantics (no-one else can change this) while reading, or implement atomic changes (no-one else can see the change halfway) when writing.

The problem on Windows is that too many APIs decided that exclusive should be the default mode if none is specified - which is the safer choice in a sense that it gives the most guarantees (and the least surprise) to the caller, but arguably the adverse effects it causes on other apps are more surprising and harmful in the end.

[hawski]

I agree with pain-points that you described.

Each OS has it's set of weird, broken and surprising behavior. Most of it in the name of backwards compatibility. There is a group of people that see one mess bearable while the all others totally brain-dead. There are other groups that have somewhat different opinion.

Everything sucks. Which one sucks less? I pick the one that I know more about.

[vertex-four]

Note that many OS operations in general require retry loops on POSIX systems.