Michael Lum <[email protected]> writes: > I guess I find it odd that the reaction to platform-specific build > issues is to rewrite the project in another language instead of > attempting to fix the issues. There are plenty of much larger C++ > projects that build on multiple platforms just fine (Ogre3d and > Mozilla come to mind).
I've worked on lots of C/C++ projects that are cross platform. there is nothing remotely "easy" about doing this for non-trivial projects, and Mozilla is decidedly non-trivial, so I don't think it is a relevant example here. nobody is arguing that it wouldn't be possible to write a trivially portable implementation of the Thrift compiler in C or C++, but it would appear that this is not what we *have*. and that presents a problem. if we had a trivially portable implementation that just works everywhere, how come people only manage to reliably build it on just a small handful of operating systems? why, then, are there so many people who need to fiddle around to build it on their macs and on their windows machines? if this was trivially fixable, why isn't it fixed already? the good thing about writing it in Python or Java would be that there would be no need to maintain binaries for X flavors of Y operating systems for Z versions of the compiler. yes, it is entirely possible to screw up any implementation in any language by lazily drowning it in awkward dependencies and packaging. this is nothing unique for C++, Java, Python, PHP, Perl or whichever language you like/dislike. -Bjørn
