Hi,

please take this as a real question and no assumption :-)

Whenever a new language appears it is used mostly by people using the originating OS. Dylan is quite Mac OS centric, most academic languages are very Unix-centric and D, well, looks a little bit windows-centric.

Of course there are guys using it with other OSs, meanwhile there is even a linux compiler from walter himself. But I'm just curious if the developers of f.ex. phobos are considerate of Mac OS, other Unices etc. What do you think? Will it be a "windows-optimised" language/lib and later be patched to fit other OSs or do you have confidence in the long sight of the bigger part of the developers? :-)

Please don't take this as any offence or so. I just saw some very nice ideas beeing buried since they were too windows centric and therefore unusable.

Thank you very much for your objective statement/opinion ;-)


Marcel

Phobos is very OS-neutral, but it is not enough to work efficiently with D. As to what independant libraries conserns, it just depends on the users and library-writers - their number, inidvidual preferences, and so  on. In general, the more enthusiastic users there are, the better different platforms are covered.

I am a Windows user myself, and i believe that many Windows users are conserned with platform independant design, since we may not always stay where we are. ;)

The reason for which D seems to be Windows-centric is that the original compiler has been for Windows, and it will take a while till GCC-based compiler can rival with it. And i heard the DMD for Linux also has problems yet, namely lacking debugging facility.

-eye

Marcel Meyer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> please take this as a real question and no assumption :-)
> 
> Whenever a new language appears it is used mostly by people using the
> originating OS. Dylan is quite Mac OS centric, most academic languages are
> very Unix-centric and D, well, looks a little bit windows-centric.
> 
> Of course there are guys using it with other OSs, meanwhile there is even a
> linux compiler from walter himself. But I'm just curious if the developers
> of f.ex. phobos are considerate of Mac OS, other Unices etc. What do you
> think? Will it be a "windows-optimised" language/lib and later be patched
> to fit other OSs or do you have confidence in the long sight of the bigger
> part of the developers? :-)
> 
> Please don't take this as any offence or so. I just saw some very nice ideas
> beeing buried since they were too windows centric and therefore unusable.
> 
> Thank you very much for your objective statement/opinion ;-)
> 
> 
> Marcel

Marcel Meyer wrote:


> Of course there are guys using it with other OSs, meanwhile there is even a linux compiler from walter himself. But I'm just curious if the developers of f.ex. phobos are considerate of Mac OS, other Unices etc.

I'm currently doing the development of a unix library (hopefully std.unix).
It will have three parts:

1. Just exports of Unix libc functions, constants and structs (80% done) in std.c.unix.unix, std.c.unix.data and std.c.unix.constants (those file will probably get splitted into some more files since currently std.c.unix.constants has a zillion definitions and polutes too much the namespace). Also, currently it will probably only work on 32bits machines since I didn't have the time to browse the /usr/include maddness to see which type_t types where fixes size and which werent. It also needs versioning() to support unixes other than Linux (I'm developing it under linux). I'll need help with those last two problems.

2. std.unix.unix: Functions that are adaptations of the former to D syntax: Using exceptions (which msg get build with strerror so you have the same message you would got in C) instead of ugly return values/errno polling, using associative arrays to return some values, using out/inout parameters and char[] strings instead of pointers, etc. This is 70% done (I need to write the exception-throwing code and to remove some functions duplicated in std), but it will need a lot of testing. This module includes:

Basic filesystem management: (f)open, (f)close, creat, (f)read, (f)write,
*seek, *stat, *chdir, *mkdir, *rmdir, getcwd, pipe, dup, *close, chroot,
*chmod, *chown, link, symlink, mkfifo, readlink, truncate, fsync,
fdatasync, fcntl, mknod, mount, etc

Terminals: tc*, cf*, etc.

Time: *time*, *timeofday, localtime, etc.

Error control: perror, herror, strerror etc (not that you need it since it
uses exceptions), etc.

Process: fork, kill, *wait*, get*id, getgroups, set*id, putenv, raise, umask, getlogin, etc.

Network: socket, send* recv*, listen, bind, accept, shutdown, *hostent*, get*by*, ntohl and family, etc.

IPC and sync: mmap, ftok, msg*, sem*, sh*, sig*,

System info: uname, sysconf, etc.

3. A class library wrapping some of those functions (terminal, sockets-streams, mmap-streams, semaphores, shared memory, etc. I will not start to work on this until I have #2 mostly rigth.

And since I'm doing this on my free time I would definitively appreciate help on the task, specially for makeing it work on 64 bits archs (lots of aliases needed with versioning, like the libc typedefs) and other Unixes. If somebody is interested and can host a public CVS server I could put all of this in a CVS (but not before I finish the #2 exception handling ;).

> What do you think? Will it be a "windows-optimised" language/lib and later be patched to fit other OSs or do you have confidence in the long sight of the bigger part of the developers? :-)

Definitively the later.

In case my email doesn't give it away, I'm a Mac user. ;)

I'm not a compiler writer, but I love D as a language.  If the GCC compiler
reaches maturity (which I
have the utmost confidence in!  Go Ben!), I'd be interested in trying to bridge
the Mac OS X Cocoa API
into D.  Afterall, Objective-C is in fact largely a macro on top of pure C, and
Objective-C calls can be
made with carefully made C calls to the runtime.  Hey, I can hope!

Owen

In article <c0vqip$1ojr$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Marcel Meyer says...
>
>Hi,
>
>please take this as a real question and no assumption :-)
>
>Whenever a new language appears it is used mostly by people using the originating OS. Dylan is quite Mac OS centric, most academic languages are very Unix-centric and D, well, looks a little bit windows-centric.
>
>Of course there are guys using it with other OSs, meanwhile there is even a linux compiler from walter himself. But I'm just curious if the developers of f.ex. phobos are considerate of Mac OS, other Unices etc. What do you think? Will it be a "windows-optimised" language/lib and later be patched to fit other OSs or do you have confidence in the long sight of the bigger part of the developers? :-)
>
>Please don't take this as any offence or so. I just saw some very nice ideas beeing buried since they were too windows centric and therefore unusable.
>
>Thank you very much for your objective statement/opinion ;-)
>
>
>Marcel