Choosing between portability and innovation

Posted Mar 2, 2011 21:04 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Choosing between portability and innovation by rfunk
Parent article: Choosing between portability and innovation

Erm... Unix was written C to be portable between various kinds of hardware, right? Not between various kinds of Unix. Linux is fantastically portable between various kinds of hardware, and so is Linux software. Even if I, as a stupid application developer am thankful to receive the odd Arm patch for my code...

Choosing between portability and innovation

Posted Mar 3, 2011 9:18 UTC (Thu) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

Look at Linux history and you'll see feature sets applications depend on changing. Programs written to POSIX and keeping out of system details haven't needed much maintenance.
Those sacrificing portability and delving too deep, are those pesky things that keep breaking.

What's needed is a kernel/user space cooperation to develop good useful APIs, and make them easy to use for applications that can be later emulated on the BSDs with a different underlying implementation.

If it proves very difficult to write another implementation, it probably suggests that the API is a crock of **** and won't stand the test of time, and the ever onward march of progress. But be an ossified handicap to future progress. Good abstractions are things that can be built upon.