[StopDisinfo910]

What are these mythical Unix semantics?

Linking to Glibc? Sharing a roughly similar file system structure? Expecting bash to be there?

Because from where I stand the people that care about BSD have spent the past decade complaining it’s getting more and more complicated to port Linux software so I’m very curious to know what the common DNA is supposed to be.

[pjmlp]

Everything that UNIX has and Windows doesn't.

[StopDisinfo910]

That’s as vague as it gets. The amount of things various Unix have in common is, well, not that much. Not that people care in any way because frankly speaking no one uses Unix.

I get that you meant is probably that MacOS is close enough to Linux that you can somehow pretend it is the same when developing things which are ultimately going to run on Linux.

To which I say, I personally think that buying Apple is wasting a lot of money for something which would work fine in a VM but well, that’s nice aluminium I guess.

[pjmlp]

It is super easy, pick any random UNIX tutorials and follow it using Visual Studio, or Windows Terminal.

[StopDisinfo910]

But certainly, but I invite you to pick any of this supposed Unix tutorial and try it on AIX or HP-UX the other two certified Unix and see if it works.

As a reminder, AIX ships with ksh, the IBM XL compiler, is configured via smit, stores parameters in ODB. It has no port system and while it supports gcc, the gnu linker doesn’t work. Also it is entirely compiled for the Power ISA architecture.

[pjmlp]

I have experience across Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Tru64, NeXTSTEP, OS X, FreeBSD and all major Linux distributions starting with Slackware 2.0.

So I might know a thing or two about portable UNIX code, and getting it to run on a non-UNIX system like Windows.

Here is a reminder for you as well, one of those follows the same dynamic linking model as Windows.

[StopDisinfo910]

You have experience with them and you are trying to pretend a guide written for them will work on MacOS. I’m glade to know you are not misinformed but actively disingenuous.

I stand by my point. Unix semantics don’t really exist in a meaningful manner. The SUS gives you very little.

To get back to the Windows side discussion, you can get a POSIX compliant shell on Windows in minutes nowadays be it Cygwin, gsh, git shell or WSL if you don’t mind using virtualisation and the C headers defined in the XBD are also minutes away. The days when developing on Windows was painful are long gone.

The rational for MacOS at this point for me is pretty much limited to “I want a MacBook as a status symbol”, same than the iPhone. They are nice machines. They are just far too expensive for what they do imho at least in Europe where Apple prices them significantly higher than in the US.