[BenH]

Originally posted by Dupre
I really wish you wouldnt reply to me, you make yourself look more stupid to the people in my office, everytime you do.
When they finally teach you to read, notice i said that Windows/DOS/PC's are more "open source" <= notice the speach marks, go ask a parent what that usually means.

I would say that there is plenty of documentation available for the API's which make the job slightly easier, so long as you use M$ approved compilers and languages and there are plenty of snippets of code available making coding an app somewhat easier. However then you have all the fun of the instabilities, slightly different versions of API's and of course the DLL's.

It once took me 70 hours to code a serial comms app for a uP slave, all because MS decided you dont really need to access the serial ports.

Windows has standard layers in which applications can run, and those systems are open for people to use with programming languages, Microsoft VS is still the most compatible environment for Windows, where-as borland does a good job, and works through some of its own layers, libraries and work arounds. UNIX isnt even slightly open source, Linux is, UNIX isnt... hence why SCO are suing everyone under the sun, its alot harder to program for Macs than PCs because there architectures are completely different, theres masses and masses of reffernce code for x86 structures, because its open, everyone knows it, microsoft have to conform to this in order to get things to run. Apples run on a system that is proprietry, like MP3... but in this case, most of the coding and technology isny avilable for people to access, even if you wrote a program for UNIX or Linux, it would work probabaly at best 80%... thats a generous number, but it wont work, if it did... there would be many people besides mac users using iTunes...

VS is overpriced second rate bloatware, Dev-C++ is far better and includes GDB support which walks all over the so called MS debugger. Still dont get Electric Fence however

As for UNIX, well it gets messy. Linux is UNIX like, actually a development of minix and shares code with BSD. BSD is a genetic UNIX to borrow ESR's term and the source is freely available under a non-viral license. SystemV source code (TRUE UNIX if you must) was untill recently freely available and had huge amounts of BSD code stolen and inserted into it. UNIXware and Solaris, the two 'big' commercial unicies are closed source, however there has been the accusation by former SCO coders than unixware is full of GPL code, especially the linux personality layer. Solaris shares characteristics with linux and includes some LGPL code seperate from the OS itself, eg the desktop.

AIX is a completely different kind of UNIX created by IBM, which was only able to be called UNIX via the license from Novell and later transfered to SCO(who BTW are now a band of fraudsters).

Apple still win however on design.

now before you reply to this, go read a book on computer architecture, or like me, take a degree in software engineering, then come back and comment.

I code in ASM (x86 and MIPS) for fun, BOW BEFORE ME!!!

Now I'm off to recover my SuSE sytem after playing with the kernel a little too much