Le 16.10.2013 13:04, Jerry Stuckle a écrit :
Anybody who thinks that being able to write code (be it Java, C, or .NET crap), without knowing a lot about the environment their code is goingto run in, much less general analytic and design skills, is going to have a very short-lived career.Anyone who can't write good cross-platform code which doesn't depend on specific hardware and software has already limited his career. Anyone who can write good cross-platform code has a much greater career ahead of him. It is much harder than writing platform-specific code.
If writing portable code is harder than platform-specific code (which is arguable nowadays), then, could it be because you have to take about type's min/max values? To take care to be able to use /home/foo/.bar, /home/foo/.config/bar, c:\users\foo\I\do\not\know\what depending on the platform and what the system provides? Those are, of course, only examples.
However, I disagree that it is harder, because checking those kind of problems should be made in every software. For types limitations, never taking care of them is a good way to have over/under-flow problems, and for the file considerations, what if the user have a different configuration than what you thought, on the same system (Of course, I know that you can access system variables to solve those problems)? Does not it means that you have to know basics of your targets to be able to take care of difference between them?
Of course, you can simply rely on portable libs. But then, when you have a bug which does not comes from what you did, how can you determine that it comes from a lib you used?
I remember having a portability problem, once. A code worked perfectly on a compiler, and not at all on another one. It was not a problem of hardware, but of software: both had to do a choice on a standard's lack of specification (which is something I did not known at that point. I have never read the standard sadly.). I had to take a look at asm generated code for both compilers to understand the error, and find a workaround. What allowed me to understand the problem, was that I had that asm knowledge, which was not a requirement to do what I did.
Of course, I have far less experience and grades than it seem you both have, and if I gave a minimalistic sample of the problem you could think that it was stupid, but it does not change that I only was able to fix the problem because of my knowledge of stuff that I have no real need to know.