Re: [DotGNU]Dotgnu written in C#?

[Rich Baumann]

On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 22:21, DrDiettrich wrote:
> This is why I consider the currently available "free" software to be not
> really free, in contrast this software is bound to a specific but
> unspecified environment. And what's worse, software which is written
> only for a specific platform, or software which is written for an
> unspecified platform? :-(

As I stated in my reply to your complaint about UTC usage in the meeting
announcement, the brokenness of your operating system is not our
problem, nor our fault. The platform targeted by most free software is
hardly unspecified. POSIX, the __Portable Operating System Interface__
STANDARD has been available for implementation for ~2 decades. That is
more than enough time for your OS vendor to at least attempt some basic
conformance. As your OS vendor has apparently failed to make any serious
attempt at conformance to date, your only options are to complain to
your vendor about this lack of conformance and/or to patch your OS
yourself. Given your vendor's history, I'll assume complaints won't
work. For patching the OS yourself, can you obtain the source to your
OS? If not, why did you voluntarily subject yourself to vendor lock-in?
If the source is available, perhaps you can search for an existing patch
through google.com; other users of your OS have probably encountered the
same problems, and a fix may already be available. If the source is not
available, perhaps a workaround is available for your OS (like cygwin
for windows) to allow you to mimic an unbroken OS.

> I also vote for an (automated?) translation of existing C projects into
> C#. Then the better error checking features of C# (or at least C++) can
> be used to comb out some lurking bugs in many projects, and the
> resulting source code will be really platform independent. Let pure or
> extended C code die away ASAP, in favor of more stable, portable and
> bugfree software!

No offence, but this is just about the worst idea I've ever heard. Well
written C programs and libraries, of which there is an abundance in the
GNU system, are the most stable, most portable, and least bug-ridden
code available. They're also usually a lot more efficient, in both speed
and memory usage, than equivalent programs/libraries written in other
languages.


Rich