reality check
Joshua Alexander Dersch
derschjo at msu.edu
Wed Jan 2 16:44:20 CST 2008
Fred Cisin writes:
>> > When the MICROS~1 stooge told me that NT was "all portable C code", he got
>> > offended when I told him that THAT is an oxymoron.
>
> On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, Bert Thomas wrote:
>> I'm confused. Are you saying that it is impossible to write portable C code?
>
> It is certainly POSSIBLE, particularly if you accept conditional
> compilation in the definition.
>
> Many application programs can be quite portable at a source code level.
> But, there are very few people around who can do that at an OS level.
>
>
Well, I'd wager that Microsoft must have at least partially succeeded at
producing portable C code, since over the course of NT history it's run on
x86, MIPS, Alpha, PPC, Amd64 and Itanium platforms. (I even have a build of
a full 64-bit version of Whistler for the Alpha lying around...) NT has a
pretty decent hardware abstraction layer.
Then again all of us here at MICROS~1 (where we love our 8.3 filenames and
it's still 1995) are stooges so it must have been Dave Cutler who did all
that for us :).
Well, back to stealing code from other companies...
- Josh
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