[ale] Ms -> Linux porting pointer sought

[John Mills]

Joe -

Thanks for the details here.

On 15 May 2003, Joseph Knapka wrote:

> > That's what I'm doing. Numeric types have not been a problem to define,
> > but I'm looking for *nix synonyms for generic 'HANDLE' (U16, I guess?)  
> > and 'SOCKET'. I don't have much in the way of MsWin examples to look at, 
> > compared to all the *nix sources. I admit to being 'Windows challenged'.

> IIRC a HANDLE is essentially a void*. But HANDLEs are used for
> resource acquisition all over the place in Windows: you have HANDLEs
> to files, windows, paintbrushes, shared memory areas, etc etc etc etc
> etc... In all those different cases, the data structure pointed to by
> the HANDLE is different, and only the Win32 implementation knows what
> to do with them (this is fine API design, BTW; Microsoft does actually
> do some things right. Well, one thing, anyway). Anything that uses a
> Windows HANDLE is generally going to require rewriting for Linux.

Looks like I'm going to meet some of those.
 
> In Linux a socket is represented by an int. In Windows, it's another
> kind of HANDLE, I think, but code that uses sockets on either OS
> shouldn't care about the representation of sockets. Therefore, if you
> use a "typedef int SOCKET" on the Linux side, most Winsock code should
> compile verbatim, except the bits that initialize the Winsock library
> (which is redundant on Linux anyway).

As long as there is a usable Linux type that's functionally similar to a 
MsWin type, my "synonym" approach is transparent. When the two worlds need 
different processing, we will have to provide parallel code. I _don't_ 
want to replicate the MsWin API in Linux (sort of a reverse-cygwin), just 
to keep code maintenance as sane as possible between the two domains.

Thanks again.

 John Mills
 john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu

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