Yes of course. When you code the implementation for each platform you always have to keep that in mind. Same is true for locks or exposing any low level syste

Yes of course. When you code the implementation for each platform you always have to keep that in mind. Same is true for locks or exposing any low level systems features. See also: high performance event handling, etc. But does anyone suggest you just can't ever use lots of sockets? (It is a bad idea sometimes, to be fair!) We write the code necessary to do it. (Since we're apparently going into personal history, I used to be a platform manager for a ~million line cross platform codebase that ran on most of the things in your list plus IRIX and OS X. Most of my responsibilities were really about keeping the build environment working enough to run one binary across all the Linux distributions, but I was also involved in issues that specific to my platform. That is one of many projects where I've dealt with platform specific issues on a variety of codebases, several of which I've written in their entirety. Anyway. I have a passing familiarity with some of these issues.)