2 Jun
2014
2 Jun
'14
12:23 p.m.
John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
Indeed. I rather like the Chicken Scheme approach:
there is a Makefile
fragment for each supported architecture, currently BSD, Solaris, Android,
AIX, Haiku, iOS, MinGW with or without MSYS, Cygwin, Hurd, MacOSX,
and Linux. If you want anything else, provide your own Makefile fragment.
This is only possible because of the standardization efforts at the
C and POSIX levels. Remember that Autoconf/Automake were invented to
solve the issue of all the forks: SunOS / Solaris / HP-UX / Ultrix /
MIPS / Pryamid / DG-UX / ad nauseum. Lots of things that were almost but
not quite entirely like V7 or System V Unix.
Today many of those players are no longer around, AND standardization of
header files and libraries means that C code is *more* portable than it
was in 1992. So there's less need for those tools *now*, but that doesn't
mean they didn't solve a real problem when they first came along.
I'll agree on most of the GNU complaints (and I'm a GNU developer...);
the original Unix "Small Is Beautiful" baby has been thrown out along with
the proprietary licensing bath water. Sigh. (Boy, was that a great use
for an old cliche, or what? :-)
Thanks,
Arnold