Comment by jonhohle
Your comment above was that it is a glibc function, which is true, but it’s there for reason. It’s also a libc, musl, uClibc, and Windows Sockets 2 function: because it’s defined in POSIX 1.1 and extended in RFC 3493.
I have no opinion on whether it’s good enough (it seems like not if every platform has a connect-by-name implementation), just that calling it a glibc function overly simplifies it’s origin.
It’s also false to say only GNU tries to be POSIX compliant. There are 8 commercial UNIXes that meet some POSIX standard, another 8 that are discontinued (at least one of which was a Linux distro), and dozens that are mostly compatible. POSIX doesn’t care if that compatibility comes from the kernel or user space libraries.
POSIX isn’t good enough at what? Maybe you don’t understand what it’s goal is/was. POSIX exists for portability. It’s a minimal set of functions developers can target to get things done on any UNIX. Any OS will always have something beyond POSIX to differentiate it.
The point I tried to make is the getaddrinfo function is not sacred. It's not the way to do anything at all on Linux. It's just the function that glibc has, and most people use it. Whether it came from POSIX or something else seems like a minor detail to me. POSIX and glibc are not sacred either.
> Any OS will always have something beyond POSIX to differentiate it.
Linux is no exception. We should all be enjoying those exclusive features to their fullest extent. Not restricting ourselves to the lowest common denominator between them. Portability is a trap.