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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?"
ACE is an open-source framework that provides many components and patterns for developing high-performance, distributed real-time and embedded systems. ACE provides powerful, yet efficient abstractions for sockets, demultiplexing loops, threads, synchronization primitives.
I've never tested this framework but it seems very good. I know several companies which use it and which are happy with it.
Your choice of Qt is a good start, but be sure to use GCC, all open source libs that exist on both sides, and adhere as closely to the ANSI standard as you can. If you do the footwork now and gather the libs and other files needed now for both sides AND keep cross compiling on both platforms as you go.
Dont think you can make it under NT and then 2 years later that it will compile on *Nix magically, you need to test every step of the way.
Oh and be sure you have the libs that are identical for both platforms and freeze them before you start. nothing kills a cross platform project faster then changing libs and finding later that the libs you built for on platform X are no-longer compatable with platformY's libs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Check Netscape Portable Runtime, (just one of the many projects that are part of Mozilla. This library provide cross-platform threading, IPC, network/file IO, and dynamic linking, among other things.
You need SourcePro from Rogue Wave, formerly Threads.h++ etc. It provides a high level, easy to use C++ API for cross platform application development. Even if you're not going cross platform, the Rogue Wave stuff is excellent, provides loads of useful classes for threading, database access, network protocol handling and more.
In addition, you can get security, high availabilty, and scaleability with far less effort and platform-dependence than a C/C++ solution.
Are you being forced to use C/C++ simply because of QT? Have you considered using QT in conjunction with Trolltech's QT AWT?
wxWindows has Networking support (socket I/O, ipc,... whatever you want), thread support, a rich feature set for GUIs and much more (unfortunately there is no support for Serial I/O).
You might even consider to drop QT in favor of wxWindows.
It is availabe for Windows, XWindows (GTK based), Mac and some other platforms. It is released under the LGPL.
Seriously. Most folks on here think Java sucks, but that's typically because they haven't actually *used* it. I think perl sucks, simply because I haven't used it and don't know it well enough to be efficient at it. That's all too common. But take a closer look at Java... It's cross platform, multithreaded, scaleable ('cept that pesky GC thing, which can be handled reasonably enough with intelligent coding), and does all the stuff you're looking to do.
I used to code exclusively in assembly, then C, then C++, and now Java. Trust me, Java is a stable alternative that will solve MANY of these cross platform issues for you, if not all.
As an example, I have written a datalogger for my car. I coded everything under Linux using vi. It's a Swing based app that's multithreaded and uses the serial port to communicate with the car's computer. I never gave a second thought to cross platform support. I just coded to the Java APIs.
One day, a friend of mine wanted to run the thing on his laptop...which had Windows 98 on it. Sure enough, I put the files onto his laptop and it ran perfectly. This was not modified in any way and didn't even get recompiled! I just put the jar files from my Linux box onto this Windows laptop and away it went. I told him this "should" work, and sure enough, it did.
As for scaleability, I have also helped design a VERY large scale middleware Java RMI server architecture for a VERY large shipping company (it's a public company...you know them...I'm positive you've used them). This handles all user-based load from their VERY large website. We're talking millions of transactions a day here, not thousands. With proper attention to garbage collection, multithreading, and a distributed architecture, this system runs without flaw, 24/7.
So Java works in real world examples, it really does. Plus, it promotes code reuse so well, that I can't imagine suggesting any other solution for your problem.