[rescue] SGI Indigo2 & IRIX 6.5

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 30 Nov 2008, der Mouse wrote:

> Quite some years ago, I had a program that, among other things, did
> pings and traceroutes.  When I went to try to build it on Linux, I found
> that basically everything about the code to generate the relevant
> packets was different.  The include file names were different.  The
> struct tags were different.  Not just the field names but the very
> topology of the structs were different.  For the packet sending and
> receiving code, it wasn't a port; it was a rewrite.  The code for
> neither could work on the other.

I think we're talking past each other.  The majority of application
software software out there doesn't need to write to raw sockets.

> Which one was "shoddy", and why?  Or does that task inherently involve
> a "low-level dependency" that excuses such differences?

I'd say that it does, since that level of the networking stack is
different on nearly every OS.

> Some applications can be written depending on nothing but standardized
> interfaces.

I wouldn't say "some" as much as I'd say "most".  I'm including in
"standardized interfaces" dependencies which can be abstracted over (X11,
your favorite X11 toolkit, OpenGL, Berkeley sockets, etc.).  Even the
amount of platform-specific stuff in the Unix port of something as large
as Mozilla is fairly tiny.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke < "There is great satisfaction in building good tools
Elgin, TX          > for other people to use."
USA               <                                     --Freeman Dyson