[Sussex] Programming languages and plaform portability

[Thomas Adam]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2005 at 05:44:48PM +0100, Mark Harrison (Groups) wrote:
> If so, what language(s) are you using.
>
> The majority of code I've _used_ has been in C, but required the
> installation of something like Cygwin on the Windows side to work.

Depends by what you're after via cross-compatability.  If you go down
the cygwin approach, then it doesn't really matter -- although the
overhead in using it, is not always applicable to some applications, or
users thereof.

If you wanted to make something which was portable across OSes (similar
to Java, but without the lead weight it comes with), then it's not so
much the language you need to worry about, as it is the widget sets used
(possibly -- if it is a GUI-based application) and more importantly the
licenses used.  There are some cross-platform widget sets available --
ftlk and wxWindows springs to mind.  GTK and Qt can be oddities at
times, although trolltech have since changed their licence for QT's use
under windows.

For the applications I have written to be portable across OSes, I have
tended to use Ruby.  But that's personal choice, at the end of the day.

-- Thomas Adam

--  
"One of us is a cigar stand, and one of us is a lovely blue incandescent
guillotine" -- Stephen Malkmus, "Type Slowly" from "Brighten The Corners"