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Difference between programming for Linux and Windows?

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mrainey:
Zaine,

Here's an opinion from Paul Turley, creator of the IBasic, EBasic, and Aurora programming languages.  These languages are all designed to create self-contained Windows executables.  Aurora is being further developed by Paul to run on Linux.

I'm sure that some programmers will disagree, but that's what makes it fun.


"Linux is worse for the programmer, always has been.  It is dependancy hell as there are hundreds of libraries that an application may depend on that are not included on all distributions.  It is up to you to package these libraries into .deb or rpm distributions."

http://www.ionicwind.com/forums/index.php/topic,1017.0.html

CodeTRUCKER:
Ok, right... I thought I just didn't know how to read the instructions on the Redhat box. :P

f0dder:
Josh: you do get a lot of control with the WIN32 API, though - thing is you don't need it most of the time. You can probably do (most of) the same under *u*x, but then you need to hunt down multiple functions to get the same effect; somewhat clearer code, but more user<->kernel transitions.

Then there's the issue of library hell - which is much worse than windows DLL hell has ever been. And if you're a commercial developer who's not into the GPL commie club, it gets much worse - either pay for special commercial license of libraries, or rewrite functionality that's on windows to begin with.

And good luck shipping a binary, with all the various library versions around, which are sometimes incompatible ABI-wise.

Documentation - sucks. manpages are horrible, texinfo only slightly better, so you end up googling trying to find a html'ized version. And no, "aprospos" isn't really a solution.

That said, platform specific stuff can usually be abstracted if you think about the problem in the right way. Even for advanced stuff like I/O Completion Ports, FreeBSD has /dev/kqueue and linux has /dev/epoll ... well, if the user has a recent enough kernel version (I be there's more people running 2.4 kernels without epoll than people running win9x :), though ).

f0dder:
BASIC: Beyond All Sense, Incomprehensible Crap. Donald Knuth, iirc, has quote where "BASIC" and "brain damage" go together. Yes, fortunately today's BASICs are less hideous than the original ones, but it's not something you should touch unless you have to (ie., VB required for a job).

app103:
BASIC: Beyond All Sense, Incomprehensible Crap. Donald Knuth, iirc, has quote where "BASIC" and "brain damage" go together. Yes, fortunately today's BASICs are less hideous than the original ones, but it's not something you should touch unless you have to (ie., VB required for a job).
-f0dder (January 08, 2007, 09:13 AM)
--- End quote ---

I haven't touched BASIC in 27 years, and I am still scarred by it. For whatever reason, my first instinct is still to think in BASIC code rather than whatever language I am working in. And I am not referring to VB either...I am talking about that BASIC stuff they taught in schools back in 1980.  :-[

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