POSIX is a standard that offers some amount of backwards compatibility. It's odd to see this as just "technical debt" and entirely ignore what it has accomplished or get anywhere near the question of whether it has been worth it or not.
I think, uncontroversially, it clearly has. Particularly, if you look at what the competing "state of the art" has been, I think POSIX has been a major win.
If you're willing to ignore the cross platform compatibility it brings you, and write your own implementations, you're suddenly presented with all kinds of nice options for managing signals. For example, signalfd(2) is sweet, and there's no reason to think that some version of this couldn't be standardized by POSIX in the future.
Some people see Engineering as a church, where purity is the goal, I see it as a tool, where useful compromise is the goal.
I think, uncontroversially, it clearly has. Particularly, if you look at what the competing "state of the art" has been, I think POSIX has been a major win.
If you're willing to ignore the cross platform compatibility it brings you, and write your own implementations, you're suddenly presented with all kinds of nice options for managing signals. For example, signalfd(2) is sweet, and there's no reason to think that some version of this couldn't be standardized by POSIX in the future.
Some people see Engineering as a church, where purity is the goal, I see it as a tool, where useful compromise is the goal.