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Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I understand what you mean (well to be honest if blunt I think I understand and believe it doesn’t really make sense).

Android has bsd-derived core utils on top of a souped up Linux kernel. That’s pretty much a textbook Unix-like. Meanwhile Darwin is Unix-certified and a significant part of XNU was originally lifted from BSD.

Unless you meant the Java based/NDK development experience? But then you can have the same thing on a Unix machine: once you are removed enough from the OS what it is doesn’t really matter.

In a way, I think I agree with you in that I also believe that what’s happening at the lower-level matters less and less for the majority of developers.

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Try to write a pure, classical, UNIX application and sell it on the Play Store.

Without rooting devices.

Likewise, try the same on iOS/iPad OS/watchOS.

Only C and UNIX/POSIX APIs, nothing else.

"Transcending POSIX: The End of an Era?"

https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/transcending...

"POSIX has become outdated"

https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/fall2016/atlidakis

By that standard, desktop Linux isn't real unix either (X11 isn't POSIX, and Wayland certainly isn't).

It’s not, that is why it’s considered Unix-like

Okay, then Android can be unix-like too.

Try to write full compliant POSIX CLI in Android.

I use termux on a daily basis.

> what’s happening at the lower-level matters less and less for the majority of developers.

Kind of. It constrains what you can do by constraining what you can represent by the semantic model the OS defines. Unix-like OSs think of processes, threads, files, networks, etc. Plan 9 unifies a lot of that - everything is represented as a file system and, in that sense, it frees one to think of networked resources as nothing more than files. Now think about the IBM i, where there is really no distinction between memory and disk storage - everything lives in a single address space. In that sense, the distinction between in-memory structures and files gets blurry. Or we can think of Smalltalk with something like the Roar VM hiding the OS the way Smalltalk always did.

The OS limits the approaches we take to solve problems because our programs must fit in their various fixtures to run.

We should probably one-up Steve Jobs and "Think Differenter".

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