[OT] mobile rising

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, November 08, 2017 10:35:17 codephantom via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 8 November 2017 at 09:34:39 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> > ...
>
> Companies (along with their technologies and profits) are like
> waves in the ocean..they come..and they go..
>
> But BSD Unix.. like the energy which binds our molecules...will
> always be with us... it seems..
>
> So I re-iterate. If we all just used FreeBSD, then we'd all be
> sitting around a fire singing kumbaya (during our break from
> writing stuff in D), instead of debating the merits of Microsoft,
> Apple and Google.
>
> ..And btw..we could immediately start writing 64bit code, with
> only a tiny 16MB download (dmd for freebsd).
>
> What operating system can compete with that?

Linux.

Oh, I'm all for using FreeBSD, but most of the arguments for using FreeBSD
over Windows apply to Linux. And if you can't get someone to switch from
Windows to Linux, you're not going to get them to switch to FreeBSD. FreeBSD
and Linux are definitely different, but the differences are small when
compared with Windows.

Personally, I think that the best course of action in general as a developer
is to try and make your software as cross-platform as reasonably possible
and let folks run whatever they want to run. A lot of the OS-related
problems we have stem from the fact that too often, software is written for
a specific OS (and not just Windows software is guilty of that).
Unfortunately, it's not always reasonable or possible to write
cross-platform software, but IMHO, that should at least be the goal, even if
you're primarily targeting a single platform for release.

All of the software at one of my previous employers is written for Windows
and uses lots of Windows-specific stuff even when the code really has no
need to be Windows-specific. They've talked about wanting to run some of
their software on Linux, but they can't do it without some major rewrites
(to the point that it might actually be better to do it from scratch), and
they're far from alone in being that boat. And it's not like there's
something special about Windows that causes the problem. You could just as
easily write your software to be Linux or FreeBSD-specific and then want to
use it in a Windows application and be screwed. Writing your software to be
platform-agnostic really needs to be a goal from the start, and IMHO, it's
really not all that hard in most cases. It's just that too often, folks
assume that they're only ever going to target a single platform.

But if you write your software to be as platform-agnostic as you reasonably
can, then the platform that you're actually using matters a lot less. It
also means that you can take advantage of development tools from multiple
platforms.

- Jonathan M Davis