Decent article, why the need for someone to pick up the pitchfork and emphasize their moral compass publicly like this? The comment and ensuing discussion is so pointless.

Hence the Cosmopolitan Libc layer that's kinda essential to the APEs described in the article. That's where all the magic is to make the same code work on a variety of operating systems.

There's even a handy table to express syscall compatibility across all of Cosmopolitan's targets - https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/functions.html

Your general point stands, of course. One can only code against a tiny subset of features. Windows has now finally gotten "real" named pipes, though. (Since Windows 8 or whenever, can't remember exactly when.)

portability in a language is sort of like the right to persue happiness vs a garantee to be happy.

A language can't direct the rest of the universe to ensure that something always works regardless of the environment or context.

But it can avoid adding it's own limitations and be agnostic itself. So c is very portable, even though c on machine A has acces to machine A features and not machine B features.

Libraries and frameworks and standards just help a little for a few common cases but they are just travel power plug adapters, not pprtability.