Re: Will interest in C++ be revived after the Java fallout?
On Jan 26, 10:15 pm, "Paul" <pchris...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
"James Kanze" <james.ka...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:657bc0a5-8454-4d89-9141-6369602e8640@j32g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
On Jan 26, 1:49 pm, "Paul" <pchris...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
"James Kanze" <james.ka...@gmail.com> wrote in message
[...]
C++ is not a portable programming language and any, non
trivial, program will only work on the system is was
designed to work on.
That's not been my experience. I've moved several large (500
KLoc or more) applications from Windows or Solaris to Linux,
with no real problems. Given the way the language has evolved,
it's often been more work to move to a more recent version of
the compiler than to move from Windows to Unix.
Even a very basic windows winmain function and messsage loop cannot be
ported, your lucky if it runs on your version of windows nvm Linux.
What's a windows winmain function? I've never seen one.
Standard entry point function for a windows process.
It's certainly not standard, and I've never seen it used.
[...]
I can't think of any programs that requires no user input
User input is often, if not always, from a file.
and are neither
sub processes or a service that has some OS specific entry point function.
A lot of Windows "applications" are plugins (e.g. to Excel). In
which case, there isn't really any entry point; they're DLL's,
which require some sort of registration (not just system
dependent, but application dependent) with the hosting
application.
Interestingly enough, you can port such programs to another
system, provided you can find an application which can host it.
Only thing I can think of is some kind of console application that takes
command line arguments, but I don't think I've seen anything like that since
win95.
Maybe it is an exageration so say "alot" of programs do not interact with
the OS?
They all ultimately interact with the OS. But not in the layers
you write: you call into a library (the C++ standard library,
Boost, whatever), and the library interacts with the OS. If
you're writing a GUI , then you need some sort of GUI library.
But as I've said, hand written GUI's are rather out of date
today---the current trend is to simply output HTML, and let
a browser be your GUI. (I'm not sure that this is a good trend,
but it does seem to be prevalent.)
--
James Kanze