[Gllug] To partition or not to partition

Nix nix at esperi.org.uk
Thu Oct 21 23:46:04 UTC 2010


On 21 Oct 2010, Alain Williams spake thusly:

> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 10:11:48PM +0100, Nix wrote:
>> On 21 Oct 2010, Alain Williams stated:
>> 
>> > On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 12:13:59AM +0100, Nix wrote:
>> >
>> >> I'd say that POSIX is useful for one thing: you can program to it and be
>> >> pretty damn sure that it'll run just about everywhere (some of us have
>> >> to write code that runs on non-Linux platforms too).
>> >
>> > +1
>> 
>> And you can use it as a stick to beat the idiot developer majority who
>> write 'portable' code from guesswork and random system man pages. :)
>
> The one that really makes me dispair is the one who writes it for the
> system that he has in front of himself and assumes that every machine
> should be like that.

That's a fairly clued one. The majority write something which happens by
chance to run, then expresses outrage that the resulting use-after-
free() and double-free()-filled, writable-string-requiring, all-longs-
are-32-bit little-endian mess fails when you put it onto a different
system.

(I mean, it's not as if writing portable C is that hard. But boy oh boy
do they ever find a lot of ways to not do so.)
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