Design for platform dependent operations

[jeff-hykin]

Perspective:

I use Deno as a replacement for bash/powershell (which has been fantastic BTW). I've run into a handful of limitations like checking if a command is valid (if it's in the path), or getting the owner of a file (as a username not UID), etc.

Cases being considered :

• macOS file attributes
• selinux permission system
• redox OS
• all the non-POSIX garbage in Windows

Discussion:

There are currently a few parts of the Deno API that behave differently depending on the OS. And I think there's quite a few more in unstable that are also not universal.

I'd like to propose having a separate part of the API for OS-specific functions, while keeping the core Deno API a bit more pure in terms of cross-platform-ness. For example, instead of having chmod-permissions married to Deno, it could be under Deno.os.unix.chmod. And instead of highly specific vanilla-linux result for lstat the returned value could contain abstracted valuest that are likely to work cross platform.

1. I think this would help core devs, since cross platform API design is much much harder than OS specific API design. Platform specific can be done first giving users the functionality they need, then later a cross-platform API can be designed, tested, and implemented.
2. It prevents bloat to the core Deno API
3. It reduces the number of edgecases, we don't have to think "does Deno.symlink work for just Unix or also windows?"
4. It would make it easy when reading a codebase to see OS specific methods at a glance.