From the image: "Operating systems known to have run curl"

How many of them are supported in mainline Curl, aren't POSIX and aren't dead operating systems?

The mainline curl repository* maintains code for supporting OS/400, AmigaOS, RISC OS, MS-DOS, Mac OS 9, and more that aren't even remotely POSIX.

What is a dead operating system anyway, and how is that relevant to the point that Windows is the hardest OS to maintain support for?

* See for instance the config-*.h files in https://github.com/curl/curl/tree/1c567f797bce0befce109bceac...

> What is a dead operating system anyway

No longer maintained / barely changing, like MS-DOS, Mac OS 9, Amiga OS (which does occasionally get an update but usually not much in the way of core changes)

It's relevant because Windows is a moving target and the dead operating systems aren't so there's not a lot of support work needed for them nor will there be as much of a user base.

Many of them are better at being unix-y because they are Unixes or Unix clones. Apart from Windows, which squares remain if one removes any Unix/linux derivative?

AmigaOS

Mac OS 9

DR DOS

OS/2

VMS

Windows CE

z/OS

MorphOS

Atari FreeMiNT

OS/400

[...]

Actually probably a fourth (EDIT: after looking more closely, make that ~half) or so of the list are not in any way UNIX.

The real joke is that people defending Windows' oddity by saying it's a VMS clone, where curl authors apparently consider actual VMS an easier platform to support.

Well, then Windows is better at being Windows.

I see Windows, Windows CE, XBox and even MS-DOS on that list.

How many from that 89 operating systems are either Linux-based (ChromeOS, Android) or real Unices (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, mac)?

Edit: And there are at least 4 Windows flavours in the list!

Some extremely different systems: Fuchsia, Cisco IOS, Garmin OS, QNX, RISC OS, Haiku, z/OS and the entire family, Blackberry 10.

There are probably more there. I recognize about half of those names only.

Are you really saying that it's normal to be harder to port some software into Windows than into z/OS?

> Are you really saying that it's normal to be harder to port some software into Windows than into z/OS?

No, I'm saying that from 89 OSes mentioned on that picture, a lot of them are better at being *nix because they are *nix.

But answering your question, sure! The only good thing in POSIX is that you have easy access to a lot of *nix software. Other than that, POSIX is a spectacularly bad API.

Windows doesn't really care about running *nix software natively, because most of Windows userbase just want and use different things. Therefore, why invest into a bad API? For those wanting to use *nix software on Windows, there is Cygwin or WSL anyway.

4? Chrome OS, Android, Qubes OS, Linux

The `Invoke-WebRequest` and `Invoke-RestMethod` PowerShell commandlets seem to work fine on Linux.