On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 18:26:45 UTC, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
I find POSIX much more palatable than the Windows API.
POSIX is ok for what it does, but it doesn't actually do very much. The topics here, for example, are not standardized (I'm pretty sure anyway). Even de-facto standards like X11 is pretty minimal; you end having to do things yourself or get random third party libraries (which are often poorly documented and the user may not have installed!). Biggest examples are GTK and Qt for doing gui widgets since X doesn't do that, but even for basic drawing, X is pretty minimal... yet pretty complex in the stuff you have to get right to do that minimal amount of work.
An example that irks me is the lack of "draw this image sized for this rectangle"; there's nothing like StretchBlt from Windows. Instead, you need to create an image (being sure to get the right format) and resize it yourself before sending those bits down to the display. (which btw cannot be compressed in the X protocol itself!)
But generally, I find when I have a task I need to get done, Win32 offers some kind of function to do it and it doesn't take too long to find it on MSDN. It might be an ugly function with a dozen arguments wrapped up in a struct, but it gets the job done and just works for the user.
On Linux, gotta go hunting for third party libraries... which might not work on the user's environment... or cannot complete the task at all (terminal emulators SUCK! want a key up notification? too bad) or can only very inefficiently (anti-aliased text on X for example... you get a screenshot, draw the text, then draw the modified image. The network won't be very transparent through that process, I tell you what.)
Though I guess GUI programming can be a little more involved, having to figure out which libraries to code against.
Yeah, that's a big problem too.
