Portable Coding and Cross-Platform Libraries?

Bradee-oh! queries: "My brother and I were just commissioned to develop a large energy management system for a few big college campuses in the area. It will be written in C/C++. We know that in 6 months, when a preliminary test system will be installed, it will be running on NT/2000 servers. The software will be tested on NT for up to 12 months and a final version will run on NT a year after that. We also know that around that time, it will shift to *nix servers, and we're expected to account for that in development. The question is, what sorts of cross platform libraries will make this as painless as possible? I've never made it a point to code for 2 platforms at once in any language other that Java. Aside from the GUI, which we've already agreed to use QT 3.0 for, we specifically are looking for cross-platform libraries for multi-threading, serial port I/O, and network I/O."

"Ideal libraries would be open source and free, though those aren't as important as tested/stable/reliable. What are your recommendations? Anyone have experience writing for multiple platforms at once with threading, serial I/O, and network I/O all in mind? The ideal scenario would be to recompile on the new platform without changing a line of code - will this type of portability be possible?"

Comments

Re:And why can't you use Java?

[kin_korn_karn]

oh, come on. this is not an application of Perl.
An "energy management" program probably has to be a lot faster than Perl can muster.

Re:exactly wrong

[joss]

Yeah, well, fuck you.. I have been using java since 0.9 was available for download. I was using it before any books on the language were available. Also, I did have aquaintances who were in the early java implementation team. No, I didn't work for Sun, I co-founded my own company instead.

Just because you're too stupid to be trusted with MI doesn't mean everybody is. Yes, MI as implemented in C++ makes it easy to get your nickers in a twist, but the argument that things shouldn't be allowed because morons might abuse them is one of my pet hates. It's fine for school kids just starting out, this is what pascal
was designed for. Java is like an OO pascal.