Re: API specification and library hell still not solved.

Thus quoth Marco van de Voort on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 11:05:52AM +0200:
> 
> The API (headers) of Linux (kernel and *nix userland) is in C, and C is
> kind of problematic to convert to an arbitrary format (e.g. a different
> language).. 

> Besides being in C (which is hard enough already), they are all different,
> and use different macros, constructs, defines etc, which pretty much means a
> custom parser for each set of headers (package), and even that isn't fully
> automatic. (and handconversions are costly from a time perspective, and
> therefore will nearly permanently be out of date)
 
And the same thing goes for Windows. That's why we program in C, although
C has some drawbacks. I did hand-convert some Windows header files into
Visual Basic at a time. If you program in Java, you get an abstract 
unified Operating System API. 

The real trouble with the various Unices is that they all have slightly 
different API's and header files. Porting legacy software to Linux will
often work with a little tweaking of the makefiles, but Linux code will
not always readily work on older OSes.

Kind regards,


Daniel von Asmuth

-- 
	wat heb je nodig bij een uitzichtloos leven? euthanasie?
	nee, windows.
	van microsoft?
	nee, van glas.