compiling on solaris 9

[skaller]

On Sat, 2007-09-15 at 14:42 +0200, Sven Panne wrote:
> On Saturday 15 September 2007 13:58, skaller wrote:
> > The RIGHT way to do this is rather messy .. but there is only
> > one right way to do it. [...]
> 
> IMHO things are not that black or white: I think we have a tradeoff between 
> almost 100% fool-proofness (which is basically the approach you describe) and 
> the ability to do cross-compilation (use available headers and perhaps 
> fail/guess if nothings sensible could be found). What is "right" has to be 
> decided on a case-by-case basis.

Of course.

> But of course you are totally right in one respect: OS-based tests when used 
> in a context like our example are silly and should be replaced by 
> feature-based tests (be it "Do we have <foo.h>?" or "What is the result of 
> compiling/running blah.c?").

I think the key point is that if you need say

	int32_t or intptr_t

you must not use them, but instead use

	my_int_32_t or my_intptr_t

size_t is required by ISO C89, C99 and C++ Standards so can be
used directly. This is annoying, but if you use these in interfaces
defining your own is necessary to avoid conflicts. In implementations
there's more freedom .. but no point not using the 'my_' versions.

In effect, this removes the 'optional' status of the symbols
and creates an in-house de-facto standard you can rely on.
Pity ISO didn't do that originally .. 


-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net