Now that's kinda cool!!
Slashdot editors accepted my submission about Ulrich Drepper's post that I blogged about recently. It spawned fierce and interesting discussion.
Many slashdotters point out that bugs showing up on specific platforms are hidden and hard to debug problems. That is why having code running on many platforms is a virtue. That is completely correct: I discovered several many memory-related bugs just because my code broke on Solaris (whereas it worked seemingly fine on Linux).
Another valid point: if you have your code ported to many platforms you are better prepared to face new platforms rising in popularity, like MacOS X nowadays. Also, if developers care about portability, code usually tends to be more modular and clean. Funny enough, reverse is also true, one of slashdot readers pointed out that InfoZip's code is a complete mess due to the fact that it supports so many platforms.
However, I believe Ulrich was not talking about this kind of bugs. At least this was not a main focus. I presume main complaint was about platform differences that are so hard to track. Starting from binary code, up to different kernels, up to different firmware, up to different peripheral hardware, up to varying implementations of C library and other interfaces like POSIX, up to different set of system utilities etc.
Many efforts (finished and ongoing) was made to ensure at least an existance of some greatest common denominator (POSIX, standard C library, LSB etc), but situation is still far from ideal and unlikely will ever be.
Posted in Software engineering frolov's blog | add new comment
Submitted by frolov on Mon, 2005-05-30 23:21.
