Earlier quoted context omitted.
What world? ChromeOS and Android? POSIX APIs are not exposed to app developers. Cloud? Language runtimes and serveless make POSIX irrelevant. IoT? Linux is largely irrelevant in the world of real time OSes and bare metal language runtimes. Desktop? How is that 1% going?
> ChromeOS and Android? POSIX APIs are not exposed to app developers. Cloud? Language runtimes and serveless make POSIX irrelevant. The underlying POSIX filesystem is still exposed to android developers via java's File. And via the C apis too, from the sounds of things. I think its the same on iOS. But even if you're only using posix calls indirectly through complicated database abstractions and unix sockets, you're…
A better API shouldn't be a filesystem. As a strictly hierarchical system, its only virtue is that it should be easy to create sandboxes and reason about the resultant guarantees. Emphasis on 'should'; in practice, chroots are easy but very ineffective. (I believe fuchsia[0] and plan9[1] do a slightly better job of this.)
Systems based (for example) on tags and tag categories are faster, more expressive, easier to reason about, and can be constructed into arbitrary trees on the fly should the need arise. (They are thus also capable of presenting a hierarchical interface to a legacy application, so compatibility isn't an issue.)
0. https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/dart-docs/dotdot.md
1. Because plan9 does a better job than unix of making all resources files, inability to access some subset of files is a stronger guarantee.