Re: Future direction and purpose of Euphoria?
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Aug 13, 2014
- 2731 views
Because of the way some portions of the code are written, though, makes it difficult to port or maintain on other platforms such as OS X and ARM. We end up with some #ifdef hacks in the code to make things work differently on different platforms when some areas (but not all) should be refactored instead. I think there should probably be very few areas of the code that are truly platform-dependent.
The platform ifdefs (from memory) tend to be things that really are different. Like...a system library that uses a different name or a different signature (lots of these between BSD and Linux and especially Windows). In some cases, we've abstracted these to the header and use our own macro wrappers so the ifdefs don't show up in the actual code.
Other areas involve low level stuff like calling C functions. Or making callbacks. Then you have 32 vs 64 bit stuff that really can't be abstracted any further (we do use stdint.h, so lots of stuff 'just works' on different platforms). We're cutting / have cut down on the number of compilers, which has simplified a fair amount of stuff.
That said, if anyone can spot something that could be refactored to make supporting different platforms easier, I'm sure we'd be interested in finding that and doing it.
Matt
