[ale] UNIX equivalent of Windows DLL

[Russell Enderby]

-----Original Message-----
 From:	Dan Newcombe [SMTP:Newcombe at mordor.clayton.edu]
Sent:	Wednesday, October 20, 1999 10:21 AM
To:	ALE
Subject:	RE: [ale] UNIX equivalent of Windows DLL

On Tue, 19 Oct 1999, Russell Enderby wrote:
> Actually not too long ago, it was mentioned that Borland's entire 
compiler
> suite would be ported over to Linux.  That is my favorite development 
suite
> anyhow.  It will bring thousands of apps to Linux overnight.  Linux is in 
> real good shape.

I don't follow the logic - how does having Borland compilers for linux
bring apps over?  All the compiler does is take WinMain, MessageBox, and
all the other Win32 calls and compile and link them.  Without having the
win32 libraries behind it, apps would still not work and probably not
compile on Linux.  Even if an app was 100% OWL (absolutley NO windows
calls), the OWL would still need to be rewritten to not use Win32.

There are twho things that'll get "thousands of apps to Linux overnight".
	- A working Wine
	- ALL of Win32/MFC/ATL, etc... ported to Linux.

I'll put my money on Wine

Well, I don't see all apps as simple as a recompile, but if a program was 
built with Borland C++ compiler on a windows box and now it ran under Linux 
with Gnome or similar app, they will have to do a few changes but nothing 
that should take a heck of a long time.  Its basically changing one 
function call to another.

Wine is an interesting mention.  I don't quite see why Wine is critical 
anymore with apps like VMware.  Why would I want to turn my Linux box into 
a Win 9X box when I can simply run windows under Linux with other OS's 
ready to go?  I can have a window with a complete BeOS, NT, OS2, Win95/98 
os running in each and still have the luxury to run Gnome under it all.

Bottom line is the more compilers out there for Linux the more applications 
will be developed/ported/and run on Linux.  It is nice to see a huge 
compiler company like Borland port to Linux.

Russell