minwin

[Don Clugston]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Gregor Richards wrote:
>>>     version (NOTWINDOWS) => version (LINUX)
>> I hate to say this, but that example just plain stupid. All it will 
>> ever do is limit your code to work on only certain operating systems. 
>> That's hindering portability, and that's no good.
>>
>> As it turns out, it's often the case that such-and-such does work on 
>> every sane operating system, and therefore version (!Windows) makes 
>> sense.
> 
> I've seen a lot of code that did that, and it was nearly always broken. 
> That's one motivation for operating system versions should be positives, 
> not "this is for not windows" or "this is for not linux". Such 
> fundamentally are wrong, and will bite you or the maintainer sooner or 
> later.

There's a horrible effect in C++ Windows where there's lots of code 
which has #ifdef __MSVC__, even though it works on many other compilers.
So vendors like CodePlay and Metrowerks fraudulently define __MSVC__.
I hope we can avoid this in D.
I've already seen some uses of
DigitalMars_Inline_Asm
because GDC doesn't support the full set of x86 opcodes. I think failure 
to implement the spec should always be tested with a positive. Certainly 
code should never have a list of compilers which meet the spec!

And if a vendor knows that they're not implementing part of the spec, 
they should provide an identifier indicating that fact. That way, the 
vendor can fix the problem without breaking existing code.