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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

No one expects iOS to run on Windows. But given that there's a Windows version of Go, it's reasonable that it should work.

And also, the points about metadata and path management are spot on. It's 2020. Languages should not be assuming that paths are byte strings.

Unix-think is a bug, not a feature. A good language should abstract the file system, not just put a teeny tiny wrapper of modesty around it.

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> Languages should not be assuming that paths are byte strings.

Lots of people who know what they're talking about disagree:

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html

Stuff exists on those file systems outside of your application, and at some point you'll have to interface with them.

For high-level languages you're writing user-facing apps in domains where your file handing needs are simple, I can see the appeal.

But of course you're ignoring the entire category of systems programming, cross platform apps that need something more than easy access to a file picker, integration code that frequently needs to deal with exactly the edge cases that these pretty abstractions ignore, etc. etc.

VB6 had its place. So does C.

> Languages should not be assuming that paths are byte strings.

They are in the real world and you have to live with that.

Screaming at people might sometimes have good results.

Screaming at reality never does.

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