Re: [ANN] nixio 0.3 - System, Networking and I/O library

[Sam Roberts <vieuxtech@...>]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 3:31 AM, steve donovan<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Miles Bader<miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> It's clear that nixio solves the particular problem very well.
> Generally, however, things are in flux.  There was a discussion about
> Luiz' proposal for a osex:
>
> http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-05/msg00470.html
>
> i.e. answering the question 'what basic cross-platform OS
> functionality can we package in a library'?

People who intend to write cross platform lua code care about the
answer to that, but nxio looks like it goes beyond cross-platform,
which is why I'll be downloading and evaluating it.

A fair amount of reworking of some of the commonly used libraries
involves adding functionality that is not cross-platform, like
sendfile(), or unified integer file and socket descriptors.

Since libraries like lfs are so small, usually a single C file, and
since changes that don't work on Windows can't be accepted upstream,
and maintaining your own version with the same name but extra
functions is annoying (and monkey-patching modules is possibly in bad
taste), it increases pressure to rewrite, or fork and rename.

Examining ruby or python's cross-platform APIs and building up the
same functionality would be useful, but both those languages standard
libraries also include platform specific functionality. Sometimes in a
seperate module, sometimes as API usage warnings.

Cheers,
Sam