On portable C programming (was: libraw1394 struct layouts...)

[Tom Buskey]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 11:25 AM, <VirginSnow at vfemail.net> wrote:

> > From: Jim Kuzdrall <gnhlug at intrel.com>
> > Organization: Intrel
> > Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 08:20:12 -0500
>
> > On Thursday 08 January 2009 00:06, Ben Scott wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 11:31 PM,  <VirginSnow at vfemail.net> wrote:
> > > > So what's the recommended way to do this?
> > >
> > >   I dunno that there really is any really good way.
> >
> >     There is a solution to the problem, I believe, if the structs are
> > data structures that you wish to be common to several environments and
> > processors.
>
> Sure there is.  Just write every program in Java. ;^)


Or perl or python or shell....

Jon Bentley's ACM column "Programming Pearls" (collected in a few books)
talks about the value of shell scripts & ASCII data files for portability.

He went from a multi user VAX to a Sun Sparc workstation to an Alpha and saw
his programs speed up considerably.  Because he didn't use binary files for
data, he didn't have to worry about endiness or 16 vs 32 bits.  Ok, this is
old stuff.

We've gone from 16 -> 32 -> 64 bits with various endieness in computer
evolution.  The next evolution will be linear to parallel (multi
core/thread/etc) and will be much harder.
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