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Are they?
I work for customers that are part of Fortune 500 companies, and this year was the first we ever had to worry about the iPad, nothing else from Apple.
Most of our projects are always done for Windows and UNIX systems anyway, with a few projects which may use less known systems like OS/400.
The only Mac OS X system I saw being carried around were by sales guys, which don't care a dime about its UNIX roots.
I briefly considered trying to get a GTK/OpenGL application to work on Windows. In theory that should have been easy, since GTK and OpenGL are supposed to be portable, and I wasn't doing anything OS-specific.
Windows POSIX layer put a stop to that pretty quickly. I used popen (which Window's POSIX compatibility layer includes) to write frames of video out to an external process, but on Linux that required that I handle SIGPIPE, and Windows' emulation of POSIX signal handling was woefully incomplete. Code that worked fine on Linux wouldn't build against Windows' implementations of signal (I think Windows didn't even define SIGPIPE as a constant).





Member since:
2005-07-08
Except when the OS decides to interpret what POSIX says in another way. Ever managed to make a serious POSIX application work across Mac OS X, DG-UX, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, BSD and GNU/Linux without a single #ifdef?
If you add the POSIX compatibility layer via the "Add/Remove features" panel Windows ends up also having quite some compatibility.
As for doing it well, it does not bring them money, so why should they care?
If Apple had decided otherwise and taken BeOS as their new Mac OS X, you would also be bashing Mac OS X POSIX compatibility.