alt Hacker NewsIf you want to support file I/O in the standard library, you have to choose _some_ API, and that either is limited to the features common to all platforms, or it covers all features, but call that cannot be supported return errors, or you pick a preferred platform and require all other platforms to try as hard as they can to mimic that.
Almost all languages/standard libraries pick the latter, and many choose UNIX or Linux as the preferred platform, even though its file system API has flaws we’ve known about for decades (example: using file paths too often) or made decisions back in 1970 we probably wouldn’t make today (examples: making file names sequences of bytes; not having a way to encode file types and, because of that, using heuristics to figure out file types. See https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/file.1.html)
You have to choose something, and I'm glad they didn't go with the idiotic Go approach ("every path is a valid UTF-8 string" or we just garble the path at the standard library level"). You can usually abstract away platform weirdness at the implementation level, but programming on non-Unix environments it's more like programming against cygwin.
A standard library for files and paths that lacks things like ACLs and locks is weirdly Unixy for a supposedly modern language. Most systems support ACLs now, though Windows uses them a lot more. On the other hand, the lack of file descriptors/handles is weird from all points of view.
Had Windows been an uncommon target, I would've understood this design, but Windows is still the most common PC operating system in the world by a great margin. Not even considering things like "multile filesystem roots" (drive letters) "that happen to not exist on Linux", or "case insensitive paths (Windows/macOS/some Linux systems)" is a mistake for a supposedly generic language, in my opinion.