By: Foo_ (foo.delete@this.nomail.com), November 20, 2010 5:56 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
anon (anon@anon.com) on 11/20/10 wrote:
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>
>It's in much the same boat as POWER. regarding developer machines, unfortunately.
>But Debian shows that it a lot of code is really quite portable these days. If you're
>aware of portability issues, there isn't a whole lot you need to bend over backwards
>for (unless we're talking about OS or compiler)
I think in most cases the main issue not portability of code (for example, endianness issues, even if they can exist, are easy to fix); it is compatibility of OS libraries. The POSIX standard is not enough when you have complex needs; then you start relying on things (either additional APIs or libraries, or specific behaviour of certain existing APIs) which are a given on Linux (regardless of the ISA) but not necessarily on, say, AIX or Solaris.
---------------------------
>
>It's in much the same boat as POWER. regarding developer machines, unfortunately.
>But Debian shows that it a lot of code is really quite portable these days. If you're
>aware of portability issues, there isn't a whole lot you need to bend over backwards
>for (unless we're talking about OS or compiler)
I think in most cases the main issue not portability of code (for example, endianness issues, even if they can exist, are easy to fix); it is compatibility of OS libraries. The POSIX standard is not enough when you have complex needs; then you start relying on things (either additional APIs or libraries, or specific behaviour of certain existing APIs) which are a given on Linux (regardless of the ISA) but not necessarily on, say, AIX or Solaris.