It's not necessarily EEE. Maybe it's just that the old wheel sucks. They want a better wheel and so they reinvented it, hopefully better this time.
The corporations making proprietary software are not the only ones who have that attitude. I've resolved to make all my free software Linux-exclusive so that I can use Linux to the fullest. The Linux kernel is packed full of exclusive non-portable features that very few people take advantage of because they're obsessed with portability, POSIX compliance or whatever. I think that's a waste.
Portable software is usually sucky lowest common denominator software. We should not limit ourselves to whatever glibc offers.
Not at all actually, passing hostnames means they can fully handle happy eyeballs for you and all other performance optimizations that you can do if you resolve and connect in one call.
It also means if you do it the 'Apple' way they might choose to intercept or modify responses. That seem in line with Apple's practices as a company even if they are not doing it yet. I feel anything they might do like that might be less likely to extend to what the article refers to as a legacy API.
If you were writing a Java application, would you do your own DNS resolution, or would you make a new socket address object and give it a hostname and let the api resolve the hostname for you? If you don’t hand roll your own dns protocol lookups, how do you know the OS, or Java or your socket library aren’t intercepting and modifying request out from under you? Heck, even if you use getaddrinfo directly how do you know your libc implementation isn’t intercepting and modifying the lookups on you? If the threat model you’re coding for is “Apple is a hostile actor intercepting and modifying dns queries” then you really can’t trust their provided posix calls either.
I would feel far more concerned that an arbitrary application that decided to do its own DNS resolution would be doing so for nefarious reasons, or might mess up the process (such as not supporting encrypted DNS in this case).
If you genuinely cannot trust the OS vendor, you don't try to tinker around in user space but you stay off their platform. Personally, this is why I don't have any machines with a Microsoft OS, and why I don't have a Playstation.
But you are already on their OS, so they would always be able to do that. They make the kernel, the hardware and it's firmware, so it's a moot point and needless paranoia. Might as well use the API that gives a better user experience.
You actually think that a Swift developer, developing against Cocoa APIs, targeting Mac and iOS devices cares about a portable API.
Because not sure if you know this but the entire software industry is built on high level libraries on top of largely portable code. For example this Swift library wraps c-ares a portable API.
getaddrinfo isn't its predecessors, there's nothing error-prone about it. The only thing that's nontrivial is falling back if the first server is unresponsive, and even there the obvious calling code is fine for almost all apps.