Informix Native FreeBSD Port

AC wrote in to say, "It seems that Informix are considering a port to FreeBSD. Cindy Munns at Informix has written to comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc asking for people interested in a port to e-mail her with your name, your company, the number of users, and so on." I've seen this message, but it doesn't seem to have hit Deja yet. However, I've tracked down a variant from Cindy in comp.databases.informix. Informix for Linux already works under FreeBSD's Linux ABI, but it's great that they're considering a native version. And remember, there's no point mailing them if you're not genuinely interested...

Comments

Cool...

[pb]

This shouldn't take too much work, right guys?

(remember "I just typed 'make'"? ;)

Linux could use to learn a thing or two from this... Wouldn't it be great when people said "We're considering doing a Linux port of XYZ Commercial Software", it ran on platforms besides x86? Now, a lot of apps do, but there's nothing wrong with a few more.

Being locked permanently into x86 binary compatibility would suck (although the Crusoe sounds pretty cool here), just as being locked into Linux binary comatibility would suck.

It reminds me of a fortune (the specs are somewhat dated, but multiply by the relevant ones by 16 or so and bear with me):

Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has
a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk
storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on
voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300.
What's the first question that the computer community asks?

"Is it PC compatible?"

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:A question for the gurus...

[divec]

OpenBSD and NetBSD are almost exactly the same OS, but configured differently.
They are more similar to FreeBSD than any of the three are to Linux.

BSD /dev is quite different to Linux. BSD doesn't have /proc.

The biggest cause of differences is differing versions of the standard C libraries. All GNU/Linuxes, and GNU/HURD, use glibc. BSD has its own libc. This means that a fair few standard functions work quite differently. In particular, GNU extensions, like the %a flag for scanf, will be missing from BSD.

Porting between unixes is often a matter of spending a bit of time tweaking bits of code here and there. Porting to/from something else, like Mac, Windows or VMS, is usually a major task and probably requires a complete rewrite. But of course this depends upon the program. hello-world.c will work anywhere.