Crowding out OpenBSD

It doesn't matter whether every Unix supports all of POSIX. What matters is that they everybody aims for common or similar abstractions, and that people test, test, test. "Portability" is a process.

I wrote a C library, wrapped in Lua, which does O(1) polling, async file notification, async DNS, async SSL, wrapped almost all of OpenSSL's X.509 key bindings, async descriptor passing, and async thread management in just about one week's worth of man power. The only dependency is OpenSSL.

Not only that, but I wrote it and maintain it for Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

http://25thandclement.com/~william/projects/cqueues.html

I learned one very important thing doing that: the BSDs generally have the better abstractions (particularly in kqueue), though Linux has more comprehensive POSIX API support. But in any event, it simply wasn't that difficult to write all of that portably, and in a small amount of code. And with VMs, it's been trivial to maintain the build for all the present releases of those systems.

The reason why people have a problem with portability is because even the best programmers fall into the habit of cargo cult programming. They're new to some API and scour usenet (or more likely these days, stackoverflow.com) looking for descriptions and usage examples. Then they copy the examples and move on.

But if you take the time to study the APIs, to study POSIX, and to study the implementation code (thank you, open source), then portability just isn't that big of deal. And the end result is that your program is more robust, because not only are more code paths tested, you actually understand what the heck is happening, as well as understand how and in what direction the APIs will evolve in the future.

It's important to constantly test on different platforms, though, and not to let portability issues fester and metastasize. But that's, sadly, what is happening with most open source software these days. People not only just don't care, they openly reject the idea portability. And that's a damn shame.

As for GNU Make, writing portable make is easy, but I allowed myself that single convenience, mostly because GNU Make is readily available everywhere. The BSD makes are almost as powerful, and I've even begun writing a make parser+compiler to translate between them. Mostly because GNU Make is darned ugly, and some of the BSD make syntax features are easier to understand while remaining just as powerful; so I want to write in a subset of of my favorite features from the different makes and then translate to each accordingly.