Yeah, the APIs aren't great on either Windows or Unix. I'm reminded of a @fasterthanlime tweet:

>Few people know the complete quote: >"Everything is a file — the worst possible primitive"

Especially in a multi-core world, you need to know a lot of Unix(/Linux) arcana to write a program that ensures ACID-like properties for files. (And this need applies to almost any program that writes to a file.) If filesystem APIs were redesigned tomorrow, they would be quite different from what we have today.