Casey Marshall wrote: > We have the responsibility, as contributors to a GNU project, to > maintain the project for the GNU system. GNU is sorta-POSIX, as are a > lot of other interesting platforms, and targeting them earns us, as > free software contributors -- not necessarily other groups or companies > that want to use Classpath -- a lot. I see these "native portability > layers" as being counter to that goal, and they especially don't make > sense given that there's no other free implementations for platforms > other than what we are targeting. An alternative take with similar conclusion: There is a standard "native portability layer". It is called Posix. There are multiple implementations of this layer available for MS-Windows. Other platforms we are likely to support (such as OS-X) already support Posix. I.e. there is no need for an extra portability layer. That is not to say we cannot add hooks and conditional compilation in modest doses to support Windows and other non-Posix platforms. But any extra indirection that hurts performance on Posix (even trivially), or anything that makes the code harder to maintain and understand is generally inappropriate. -- --Per Bothner per@xxxxxxxxxxx http://per.bothner.com/
