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Have you ever tried to write portable code for multiple unixes?

by thefre 15y ago

saurik 15y ago
Yes. Afterwards, I learned more about standards and specifications (including taking on a weird fetish for lurking on the mailing lists where people actively are working on them), and realized that my attempts were flawed by premise. ;P Seriously, POSIX is /not/ able to provide for you the ability to have a single program always work on every system: they tried really hard, but the world isn't perfect. They were (and are) attempting to unify and control something really complex, and they made remarkable progress given how many people they were trying to bring together who already had existing incompatible implementations. In this case, they carefully made clear that this behavior was unspecified. That does not mean that they failed or that their specification was broken. In fact, I'd argue the opposite: if they had required implementations to do something in specific, the specification would be broken as it would not have described reality. You can't just claim that the implementations of your standard that people are actively trying to code against don't exist or are incorrect. Honestly, though, to take a more direct appraisal of your question, the real epiphany for me came when someone clubbed me over the head with the difference between "portable" and "ported", and then demonstrated that all of the people that had come before me whose work I most admired had concentrated on making "portable" code as opposed to "ported" code: the most amazing code I've ever seen is the code that has managed to easily be adapted to changing environments as it had the simplest design and most powerful abstractions from the underlying systems, often as a direct result of attempting to embrace so many unrelated platforms. Which then leads to a "better" question: have you ever tried to write code that could easily be ported between multiple operating systems, whether they be any of the numerous implementations of Unix (old or new, BSD or System V, largely compliant or downright buggy), Windows (using native APIs, not compatibility wrappers), or Mac OS (9, not X)? If not, I recommend trying it, as that is what "portability" really is: once you experience it for your own code, it is difficult to take projects that insist on only working on a single homogeneous set of environments seriously anymore.

Have you ever tried to write portable code for multiple unixes?

by thefre 15y ago

Have you ever tried to write portable code for multiple unixes?

Yes. Afterwards, I learned more about standards and specifications (including taking on a weird fetish for lurking on the mailing lists where people actively are working on them), and realized that my attempts were flawed by premise. ;P Seriously, POSIX is /not/ able to provide for you the ability to have a single program always work on every system: they tried really hard, but the world isn't perfect. They were (and are) attempting to unify and control something really complex, and they made remarkable progress given how many people they were trying to bring together who already had existing incompatible implementations. In this case, they carefully made clear that this behavior was unspecified. That does not mean that they failed or that their specification was broken. In fact, I'd argue the opposite: if they had required implementations to do something in specific, the specification would be broken as it would not have described reality. You can't just claim that the implementations of your standard that people are actively trying to code against don't exist or are incorrect. Honestly, though, to take a more direct appraisal of your question, the real epiphany for me came when someone clubbed me over the head with the difference between "portable" and "ported", and then demonstrated that all of the people that had come before me whose work I most admired had concentrated on making "portable" code as opposed to "ported" code: the most amazing code I've ever seen is the code that has managed to easily be adapted to changing environments as it had the simplest design and most powerful abstractions from the underlying systems, often as a direct result of attempting to embrace so many unrelated platforms. Which then leads to a "better" question: have you ever tried to write code that could easily be ported between multiple operating systems, whether they be any of the numerous implementations of Unix (old or new, BSD or System V, largely compliant or downright buggy), Windows (using native APIs, not compatibility wrappers), or Mac OS (9, not X)? If not, I recommend trying it, as that is what "portability" really is: once you experience it for your own code, it is difficult to take projects that insist on only working on a single homogeneous set of environments seriously anymore.