"The only fields in the dirent structure that are mandated by POSIX.1 are: d_name[], of unspecified size, with at most NAME_MAX characters preceding the terminating null byte; and (as an XSI extension) d_ino. The other fields are unstandardized, and not present on all systems; see NOTES below for some further details.
then continues
Only the fields d_name and d_ino are specified in POSIX.1-2001. The remaining fields are available on many, but not all systems. Under glibc, programs can check for the availability of the fields not defined in POSIX.1 by testing whether the macros _DIRENT_HAVE_D_NAMLEN, _DIRENT_HAVE_D_RECLEN, _DIRENT_HAVE_D_OFF, or _DIRENT_HAVE_D_TYPE are defined.
Other than Linux, the d_type field is available mainly only on BSD systems. This field makes it possible to avoid the expense of calling lstat(2) if further actions depend on the type of the file. If the _BSD_SOURCE feature test macro is defined, then glibc defines the following macro constants for the value returned in d_type:"
But I'm not sure what to make of this.