Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem awhile ago, not sure what happened to it. The NT Kernel was designed to have different personalities like Win32, OS/2, POSIX, etc
Its ironic (old)microsoft exerted so much effort to put the personalities in place (OS/2, posix etc), then (mid)microsoft systematically destroyed that work under Balmer, and now (new)microsoft are reimplementing the same thing under a (seemingly) completely different system.
To be fair, this new implementation is very completely different. If we had the same kind of experience with virtualization and hardware with VT-i/x/d or AMD-V when Microsoft was developing personalities, the chips would have landed very differently.
>Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem awhile ago, not sure what happened to it.
I was interested in that too, since I write Unix utilities and it is sometimes useful to have them work on Windows as well. I've done that (checked that it worked on Windows) with a few utilities in the past (written in C), that did not use any very Unix specific features that were not present on Windows. And remember reading around that time that Windows (I think it was from NT onwards) had a POSIX subsystem.
Then more recently, as in, a few months ago, I wanted to check that out again, and did. IIRC I read (maybe on a Wikipedia page) that the POSIX subsystem is not present in Windows any more.
"Windows NT was designed from the start to have modular subsystems. It was most infamously used to provide a POSIX subsystem which really only checked boxes on government acquisition forms. :-)"
That makes it seem that the POSIX subsystem only ever did that, which is not true at all. A better explanation is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11392369 , which gives a version number and a time frame for context. The POSIX subsystem was different in later years.
It could be an updated version.