Re: question: hard-coded file descriptors in stdin/stdout/stderr

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On 03/17/2013 10:26:31 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> > You want to introduce non-posix assumptions into musl to make
> > windows code more elegant.
> >
> > Really?
> 
> No, he just wanted to eliminate some assumptions (guaranteed by POSIX)
> and use macros instead of hard-coded magic numbers. But this turned
> out not to be necessary or useful anyway, for reasons connected to the
> ones you cited. We arrived at this conclusion with no need for
> flaming. :-)

Sorry, I used to work on OS/2. My response to Microsoft is the same as  
Vogon Grandmothers and the Ravenous Bugbladder Beast of Traal. "In  
brief: avoid." (Pure reflex at this point.)

> > >* as for psxcalls: this is a C library, that exclusively uses the
> > >Native API.  It
> > >attaches to ntdll.dll during run-time, and can thus be compiled as
> > >a "native" static
> > >library with no external dependencies.
> >
> > Doesn't mingw already exist?
> 
> mingw is not a libc. It uses msvcrt, which is horrible.

Oh agreed. I set up a mingw environment to run under wine to test my  
old tinycc fork with at one point. It's just _less_ horrible than  
cygwin (which I've also had to use).

> The reason for
> getting a real proper libc on windows is not to make windows' users
> lives easier, or at least that's not my reason for wanting it. Rather,
> it makes OUR lives easier, because FOSS projects can just target POSIX
> and keep their cores simple, rather than being full of #ifdef hell or
> "portable runtime" hell.

That was the part that was confusing me, POSIX _does_ say that 0 is  
stdin, 1 is stdout, and 2 is stderr. "Targeting POSIX" would mean  
write(2, "error message"); is allowed.

Also kinda hard to do shell scripting without that definition:

   $ cd ~/linux/scripts
   $ grep '2>&1' * | wc -l
   32

Windows _isn't_ a unix. I don't see how you're going to fix the things  
cygwin did without either reinventing their huge glue layer, and the  
obvious alternative is mingw's not dealing with any of it...

*shrug* As long as I can continue not to care, it isn't really my  
problem. But this is a can of worms.

Rob