Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Sun Apr 21 17:32:52 2002

It was thus said that the Great ajp166 once stated:
>
> The whole mid 80s thing with workstations was a disaster in many respects as
> everyone was trying to put more processor in a box and unix was the OS of
> choice as it was easily ported and offered most of the higher level OS
> functions that stuff like DOS was clueless about. The problem was unix was
> easily ported though it didn't make for portable apps, usually due to
> underlying hardware or even the basic processor. In that respect CP/M and
> DOS made it easier as at least if it was CP/M-80 you knew your base cpu was
> 8080/z80 and if it was DOS you could bet on 808x. Unix back then meant
> MIPS, VAX, PDP-11, SUN/sparc, 68000, Z8000, and a few dozen I likely missed.

  That doesn't make sense. UNIX you state as being easily ported, even
though as a kernel it has to hit the hardware pretty hard, yet you state
applications as not being portable at all, because of the underlying
hardware and processor (which the application shouldn't care about). If
anything, I would think the opposite would be true.

  Now, speaking as a programmer who's done cross platform programs, I've
come to the conclusion that writing portable software isn't difficult and
with enough experience it becomes quite easy in fact. It's programmers that
make unwarrented assumptions about their code or platform that make for
unportable applications.

  Granted, on the 8-bit systems you often times had to code in Assembly,
both for speed and size reasons (and because compilers for such systems
weren't good enough) but when you get to UNIX the whole point was to avoid
assembly in the first place [1]. Therefore, you are writing in a higher
level, more portable language and then it becomes possible to write code
that will run across platforms. Heck, I've written a program that has
compiled across several different UNIX platforms (SGI, Linux on the x86,
Linux on the DEC Alpha, OpenBSD, FreeBSD) without problems [2] and you'll
notice that there is at least one 64-bit architecture listed there. The
same code was successfully compiled (with one line of code change, plus a
few other lines to get the correct header files loaded) under Microsoft
Windows. Okay, it may not have been optimum code under Windows, but it
still ran with minimum of changes or fuss.

  -spc (Whose first major program in C I ported (with real minimal changes)
        between OS/2, MS-DOS, AmigaOS and UNIX ... )

[1] Unless speed was critical (remember, I'm talking about applications
        under UNIX, which shouldn't hit the hardware at all), at which point
        you find the bottle neck, and rewrite that portion in assembly, and
        keep the original C around in case you have to port (or someone has
        to port) the code to a new chip. The rest of the application can
        remain in C.

[2] Okay, one problem---the DEC Alpha port crashed, but it was tracked
        down to a bug in the C library call memchr().
Received on Sun Apr 21 2002 - 17:32:52 BST