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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?"
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.
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?
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.