Re: Cross-platform, the freedom to choose any computer
- From: Peter Ammon <gershwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:41:20 -0800
toby wrote:
Peter Ammon wrote:Otto Wyss wrote:I think it's worth to think a little about "Cross-platform Development" and have therefore written this paper here:
http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=Cross-platform.html
See for yourself, if it's something you can use.
O. WyssIf every program runs on every platform, what's the point in having more than one platform?
In the real world, there are hundreds of different platforms. The more software can be made available on the wider variety of hardware, the better off end users are.
I am using Mozilla Thunderbird, a highly portable program, to type this message. Mozilla Thunderbird appears to do its own contextual menu handling - the typeface and font size of its menu items is different from other applications, the menu vanishes instead of fading out, the shadow is drawn differently, and the cursor remains an I-beam instead of becoming the arrow when the menu is opened. The effect is unpleasant and visually jarring. These bugs exist because of its portable nature - because it attempts to do menu handling the same way on multiple OSes.
There's a tradeoff between making your software portable and making it a "good citizen" on the platforms you target. The OP advocates making every piece of software run on every OS; that's a recipe for terrible software on any particular OS.
This is the FSF's quite rational position.
Put another way - if you don't code to take advantage of the features and obey the human interface standards of a particular platform, your program will be inferior (on that platform) to one that does.
I guess we must first exclude the tens of thousands of portable command line tools and libraries on any UNIX system from your argument.
Not at all, it's just as applicable. Example: the venerable BSD cp command knows nothing of multiple file forks on Mac OS X (a flavor of Unix, note). Copying a multi-forked file with cp will corrupt it. Apple eventually fixed this bug by adding OS X specific code to cp, which rendered it less portable.
-Peter
-- Pull out a splinter to reply. .
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