Re: supporting second tier OSes
Peter da Silva (peter@nmti.com)
Thu, 7 Sep 1995 10:52:57 -0500 (CDT)
> Questions: Which would you do first? Which would you do second?
> Would you do SGI?
> Our answers for comparison: HP 9. NT. Not unless a whole BUNCH of
> people with checkbooks call soon and place firm orders.
My answers would be "HP, and beat on my developers to write portable
code", "What's the next most common UNIX box in that list?", and "After
a couple of rounds it should be a matter of typing "make"..."
Porting to NT should come down to "which C compiler has the most POSIX
compliant runtime?". The NT POSIX subsystem, of course, is utterly useless
for this purpose.
But writing portable UNIX code isn't as hard as it's made out to be, if
you start out with portability in mind. Like security, it's hard to tack
on later.
...
What a coincidence. I just had a developer come up and ask a question
about converting between integers and pointers, and I provided a solution
that didn't require doing any conversion. The code he writes is going to
be more portable, now.
And it's going to be clearer, because the solution I provided exposes less
information to calling routines.
Now I wish I was in a position to mandate the use of POSIX rather than Mach
primitives when available...