Platform Independent C++ OS Library?

quench writes "Hello! I have been away from Windows and Linux application software for 5 years or so, doing mainly C-like embedded C++ programming. Now, I am about to start a project emulating embedded hardware on Windows. Been there, doing #ifdef WIN32 and #ifdef LINUX stuff, don't really want to go there any more. What I actually need is a platform independent lib covering Windows and Linux variants to handle sockets, IPC and threads abstractions. And a rock solid but simple embedded database to emulate flash memory. My reflex said, go for ACE and Berkeley-DB. Tell me, am I out of time? Am I missing something new and trendy, easier to use and better? Did time stand still?"

Comments

Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia QT rocks...

Re:Qt

[KirstuNael]

I concur. My Qt-powered multithreaded and networked (TCP&UDP) application is compiling and working nicely in linux, osx and win32 without any os-specifc #ifdefs.

Re:Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

Point for point:

- sockets
- IPC
- threads abstractions
- Database. Well, not quite so simple, but Sqlite3 as backend is available.

Re:Qt

[rtfa-troll]

OP didn't say anything about UI, as you'd surely know if you had bothered to read the summary:

QtCore has more or less nothing to do with UI.

Re:Qt

[jmv]

I've once attempted to use Gtkmm for a new project. While the API is generally well designed, I found that the documentation for many features was totally inexistant. Even more annoying was the fact that some components were either buggy or not wrapped (from C Gtk) at all. Combined with the fact that components get created and deprecated at a huge rate, you don't even know what you should be using. Overall, I've had a really bad experience with Gtk (and especially gnome) development. I've only tried using Qt a little bit and so far I like it a lot. I've never done GUI with it though. I've used the "platform independent system library" part for things like threads, sockets and the like. The only thing I found a bit annoying was that it didn't integrate well with the STL.

Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Qt. It's LGPL (So it's free for commercial projects as well), is well documented and offers a ton of abstractions (including sqlite).

http://qt.nokia.com/

And tool support is excellent as well (Visual Studio Add-In, Eclipse Plugin and a standalone IDE called QtCreator).

TBB works wonders for threading

[Wrath0fb0b]

Intel Thread Building Blocks (http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/ is (are?) fantastic. Open source (GPL), works on any ISO-compliant C++ compiler and is fairly intuitive. It allows both high-level (parallel_for) and low level (task-based) parallelism. Particularly useful are the concurrent containers, since it saves you from reimplementing these basic structures.

Boost

[aePrime]

Boost has libraries for each of these three: sockets through the ASIO library, IPC through the Interprocess library, and threads through the threads library.

http://www.boost.org

The only thing that Boost is lacking for which you asked is a database library.

Re:Boost

[mls]

SQLite databases are small, powerful and platform independent and might be a good choice to fit your database needs. The code is public domain.

Re:Boost?

[Homburg]

Boost has pretty strong threading support, which is the basis for the threading capabilities in the forthcoming revision of the C++ standard. Boost also has cross-platform IPC and socket libraries. It would be a good choice for the OP, I think.

As someone working on a massive project...

[QuoteMstr]

I'm working on a rather large cross-platform C++ project at the moment. Here are a few tips:

1. Use Boost. It's a very liberally-licensed, high-quality library from the people who created the C++ language itself. It contains a ton of cross-platform libraries that do lots of useful things, from threads to regular expressions to writing testsuites and parsing command-line options. If Boost provides a piece of functionality, there's very little reason not to use its version.
2. See rule #1.
3. If you need cross-platform code that isn't in Boost, at least use the following approach:
   • Create a common interface definition
   • In separate files, implement the interface in terms of various platforms' primitives
   • Keep platform-specific code out of the rest of your program; if you can help it, don't even include platform headers in most of your program
4. Use autoconf to handle platform idiosyncrasies. There are a ton of available macros to help detect things about a build platform.
5. Write testcases. You should write tests for all your programs, but it's especially important to do it for cross-platform code because it's easy to break something and not notice.

Re:As someone working on a massive project...

[Anonymous Coward]

it is all well and good, but he cannot even read options 3,4 and 5 because of your recursion!

Re:Apache Portable Runtime

[boilednut]

From the wikipedia articel:

APR was originally a part of Apache HTTP Server, but has now been spun off into a separate project of the Apache Software Foundation, and is used by other applications to achieve platform independence. The range of platform-independent functionality provided by APR includes:
* Memory allocation and memory pool functionality
* Atomic operations
* Dynamic library handling
* File I/O
* Command argument parsing
* Locking
* Hash tables and arrays
* Mmap functionality
* Network sockets and protocols
* Thread, process and mutex functionality
* Shared memory functionality
* Time routines
* User and group ID services

Cygwin or UWIN

[jdb2]

If you want "close to the metal" POSIX API compatibility then there's Cygwin which is easier to use IMO and more actively developed but doesn't support the *full* POSIX spec or there is UWIN which supports most of the POSIX spec.

Combine this with OpenGL, OpenAL, the SDL and Cygwin/X, QT, a Java layer using the SWT from Eclipse, *shudder* GLUT *shudder* ;) or IMNSHO preferably wxWindows/wxWidgets and you've got yourself a full cross-platform programming toolkit that can do just about anything.

jdb2

Sorry, C variants aren't trendy...

[CptNerd]

Unfortunately all the trendy cool kids are using Java these days, and only web-based applications are worth working on if you want to keep up with the times. The days of small, simple client-server apps are over, old hat, out of date, archaic. Nowadays you need to implement a web application using AJAX, web services, Struts and Spring and Hibernate, and you have to do it using Agile methodology. If you aren't linking in at least 100 Java class libraries, you don't have a "real" application.

C++? Too simple.

Re:C++ is so old school...

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Yes, QT is really excellent, but it's worth it to look at Boost as well.

Want a database? Why use Berkeley when there's SQLite?

Portable sockets? QT and Boost both have them.

Portable file ops? QT and Boost both have them.

Data structures? QT has a bunch, but STL is what you should learn.

Windowing lib? QT works on both Windows and Linux. You may be tempted to use WXWidgets, but don't. Despite the fan boyz, you'll find that library to be buggy as shit, and impossible to debug. Sorry, that'll probably get me marked as a troll, but it's true.

And QT on Windows comes WITH the MinGW compiler for Windows package. You don't need to use any other tool than gcc on Linux, Mac, or Windows.