> operating system implementation of POSIX, or dynamic library loading, all the subtle things with different binaries formats, and so forth.
That is the real pain point. I embed Spidermonkey on not just Linux, but also Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. While they are all "POSIX", they all have their peculiar issues which make it harder to dev with or write OSS. Autoconf, while hardly the best option, usually allows enough tweaking to get by in these strange worlds. Solaris is usually the nicest of the pack, while AIX is usually the odd ball. Submitting patches to OSS is easy enough to support these systems most of the time, but the annoying part is that things usually regress again quickly and so you're left constantly bug-fixing when things should "just work". Part of the mess could be avoided if vendors all rallied around GCC/Clang/gdb and redirected their compiler efforts to optimizing open compilers for their hardware. Maybe POSIX needs to evolve faster -- if you view an autoconf test for something as an inconsistency that POSIX could standardize away.
EDIT: Here's a perfect example of something which should be "easy" and standard in POSIX. Getting the stack base address of your process. (search for XP_UNIX)
That is the real pain point. I embed Spidermonkey on not just Linux, but also Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. While they are all "POSIX", they all have their peculiar issues which make it harder to dev with or write OSS. Autoconf, while hardly the best option, usually allows enough tweaking to get by in these strange worlds. Solaris is usually the nicest of the pack, while AIX is usually the odd ball. Submitting patches to OSS is easy enough to support these systems most of the time, but the annoying part is that things usually regress again quickly and so you're left constantly bug-fixing when things should "just work". Part of the mess could be avoided if vendors all rallied around GCC/Clang/gdb and redirected their compiler efforts to optimizing open compilers for their hardware. Maybe POSIX needs to evolve faster -- if you view an autoconf test for something as an inconsistency that POSIX could standardize away.
EDIT: Here's a perfect example of something which should be "easy" and standard in POSIX. Getting the stack base address of your process. (search for XP_UNIX)
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/90575e23ea93/js/s...