Version Identifiers for Platforms / Architectures not supported by DMD

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 07-11-2011 13:29, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2011-11-07 11:55, Manu wrote:
>> True-ish, but they're not even slightly the same from a developer
>> perspective. People often make that mistake, where technologies are
>> similar, but neglect the fact that you have to do fundamentally
>> different things on the devices.
>> They need to be distinguished. If darwin is defined, then it ALSO needs
>> a OSX/iOS for disambiguation in addition.
>
> That's correct but it also depends on what you're developing. Say if you
> develop a library for handling strings (not drawing) they would probably
> be exactly the same on Mac OS X and iOS.
>
>> Yes, but they need to be declared standard, and listed somewhere. If
>> they're not reliable, then you'll inevitably be in the same mess as
>> cross platform C apps where you need a global header that parses and
>> munges a huge pile of arbitrary defines into useful macros for your app.
>
> This is a list of all predefined version identifiers:
> http://d-programming-language.org/version.html#PredefinedVersions

That list is, in fact, very out of date. I have some pending patches in 
my fork here: 
https://github.com/alexrp/d-programming-language.org/commits/master

I'll send those upstream when the GDC patch is merged.

>
>> For any platform/architecture, there should ALWAYS be available at least
>> identifiers for PLATFORM, OS, and ARCHITECTURE.
>> An identifier for TOOLCHAIN is often useful too, since different
>> toolchains for the same system might be slight different, eg. console
>> game dev in particular... GCC, SN, Codewarrior, proprietary compilers;
>> all target exactly the same thing, but require some toolchain specific
>> code.
>
> What is "platform" in this case.
>
>> Basically I think if those three (I'd argue for 4) things aren't
>> present, standardised, and dependable, there will always eventually be
>> the mess we all love in the top of C header files.
>>
>> For instance, the OSX example above, I'd suggest something like:
>> PLATFORM = darwin
>> OS = OSX/iOS
>> ARCHITECTURE = X86/PPC/ARM
>> TOOLCHAIN = [whatever]
>
> Ok, so for linux it could be the following?
>
> platform = linux
> os = ubuntu
> architecture = x86
> tool chain = gcc
>

- Alex