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From: rommel@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Kai-Uwe Rommel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
Subject: Re: Porting C under UNIX to OS/2
Keywords: UNIX, OS/2, Porting
Message-ID: <1991Mar22.082057.6644@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE>
Date: 22 Mar 91 08:20:57 GMT
References: <907@npdiss1.StPaul.NCR.COM> <583@genco.bungi.com>
Sender: news@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE
Organization: Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 27

In article <583@genco.bungi.com> rad@genco.bungi.com (Bob Daniel) writes:
>In article <907@npdiss1.StPaul.NCR.COM> remde@npdiss1.StPaul.NCR.COM (Kevin Remde) writes:
>>I've recently been given the task of researching the ins and outs of 
>>porting C code from UNIX to OS/2 platforms.  I was wondering where I
>>might find books or other resources that might help me in this task. 
>
>I have not ported a UNIX app to OS/2 but have done it to Macintosh.  The key
>issue is the compiler you use.  I was using a compiler that contained all the
>UNIX libraries (and ANSI C).  It was Think C.  This biggest issue that came
>up was forking processes.  It was however relatively easy to deal with.  Just
>modify it to run under the same process.

During porting several programs to OS/2 I found two main problems.

1. Many Unix programs rely on Unix-specific library routines that are
   not supported even by the very Unix-compatible Microsoft C compiler,
   most notably the POSIX directory access routines (opendir/readir/ 
   closedir) and regular expression routines and getopt. I had to
   collect or write/modify such routines. Once I had them, porting was
   much easier.

2. Many today's Unix programs assume a 32bit machine with
   sizeof(int) = sizeof(long) = sizeof(any pointer) = 32bits.
   This is not easy to solve.
   (Anyone still asking why GNU emacs is not yet available for OS/2 :-)

Kai Uwe Rommel