# POSIX > [!quote] The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interfaces (API), along with command line shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility (portability) with variants of Unix and other operating systems. POSIX is also a trademark of the IEEE. POSIX is intended to be used by both application and system developers. > [POSIX - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX) ## Links - [[BOOK - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - W Richard Stevens Stephen A Rago]] - [[BOOK - The UNIX-haters Handbook - Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassmann]] A short article about the history of [[POSIX]] and the evolution of the [[Unix]] [[Operating Systems]] [[API Design|API]], and a short overview of the future. Not much meat, but a nice reference to other in-depth resources. - [Transcending POSIX: The End of an Era? | USENIX](https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/transcending-posix-end-era) It goes into "transcending POSIX" by exposing: - [[Asynchronous IO]] - offloading work to [[General Purpose GPU Programming]] ([[OpenCL]], [[Cuda]], [[Vulkan]]) - bypassing the kernel for IO using for example [[eBPF]]