[ntp:questions] Dual-core systems - AMD - Windows Vista

David J Taylor david-taylor at blueyonder.not-this-bit.nor-this-bit.co.uk
Sun Dec 9 15:14:08 UTC 2007


Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
[]
> That can be extremely difficult to achieve over multiple platforms and
> compilers.

Multi-platform must make zero warnings many times more difficult - I can 
appreciate that.

> It is made more difficult because various compiler accept different
> deviations from the standard.  I believe that gcc is notorious for
> that and there may well be others.

Standards - don't you love it when there are so many to choose from!

> In the days when I was porting Unixish C code to OpenVMS, I used the
> compiler options that demanded "maximum rectitude" for compliance with
> the then ANSI standard. (I believe the standard changed several times
> since I last did this.)  This found a couple of actual bugs and quite
> a bit of what I considered "sleazy coding" which I did my best to
> clean up.  I added zillions of missing function declarations,
> corrected function declarations that falsely claimed that a function
> returned something that it did not or vice versa. . . .

I know I much prefer the far fewer variants of Windows compared to the 
multiplicity of versions of Linux - people were demanding exactly this 
version of that release with those options.  Oh, and they had different 
package mechanisms as well!  Not good for a very small software team.

Actually having two different teams working to the same document can lead 
to good results, though.  I recall how the folks in VMS writing the 
equivalent of "chkdsk" would check disks produced by the OS writers, and 
find how different folk had interpreted different fields.  I try for 
clarity rather than cleverness when coding.  I may even have to maintain 
the code myself!

Cheers,
David 





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