Porting State

Introduction

My intention is to port the STLplus library to as many platforms as I can reasonably support. SourceForge help here by allowing access to a wide range of different platforms that I can run tests on.

Porting Issues

There are a number of porting issues to be overcome:

Different Operating Systems

One of the objectives of this library is to provide platform-independent access to operating system services that differ between platforms. The idea is to hide the implementation behind a common interface. By writing software to that interface, you automatically get portable software. At least, that is the theory.

Different CPU Architectures

Different CPUs have different word lengths, different byte ordering and different integer type definitions. The intention is that STLplus will work with all variations of these characteristics that I come across.

Different Compilers

The concept of portability means portability between operating systems, not necessarily portability between compilers. However, to cater for different tastes in compilers, under Windows the library will work for either the Gnu gcc compiler or the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler.

Different Compiler Versions

It is also important that software will build with different versions of each compiler, because I have no control over which compiler you are using and there's a good chance that you don't either. The STLplus library should ideally work in whatever development environment you have chosen (within reason). So, STLplus works with different releases of these compilers, not just the latest one. At the time of writing STLplus builds with all versions of gcc from version 2.95 up to 3.4 and has been reported as working with version 4. It also works with Visual Studio versions 6, 7 and 8 although I only supply project files for v6.

I refer to a "platform" as a particular combination of CPU, Operating System and Compiler.

Porting Progress

SourceForge, which hosts STLplus, used to provide a Compile Farm so that I could test STLplus on different platforms. This enabled me, for example, to fix problems with data persistence on 64-bit CPUs. Unfortunately, the Compile Farm has now been withdrawn, so I can only test the library on my Windows machine. However, I can still test against both Unix (Cygwin emulation) and Windows, and both Visual Studio (Windows native) and Gcc compilers (both Windows native and Unix emulation).

If you can confirm the library works on any other platform or compiler combination, please let me know the details - Compiler, Compiler version, OS, CPU etc.

The following table shows the platforms that STLplus has been ported to so far.

Porting State
Platform Build State
CPU Bits OS Compiler Name -D1 Tested Notes
Intel 686 32 Windows XP gcc 3.4.4 (Unix emulation) CYGWIN-i686 2 November 2007 Uses Cygwin to build a Unix-emulation program that runs on Windows
Intel 686 32 Windows XP gcc 3.4.4 (Windows native) CYGMING-i686 _WIN32 2 November 2007 Uses Cygwin to build a native Windows program
Intel 686 32 Windows XP gcc 3.4.5 (MinGW) MINGW-i686 _WIN32 2 November 2007 Uses MINGW to build a native Windows program
Intel 686 32 Windows XP Visual Studio, v6 _WIN32 2 November 2007 Visual Studio v6 - requires SP5
Intel 686 32 Windows XP Visual Studio, v8 _WIN32 2 November 2007 Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition
Intel 686 32 Debian Linux 2.4.19 gcc 2.95.4 LINUX-i686 21 September 2005
DEC Alpha 64 Debian Linux 2.2.20 gcc 2.95.4 LINUX-alpha 17 January 2006
AMD Opteron 64 Red Hat Linux 2.6.9 gcc 3.4.2 LINUX-x86_64 21 September 2005
Sun Sparc 32 Solaris 5.9 gcc 3.3.2 SOLARIS-sun4u SOLARIS 21 September 2005 Posix build except that Sun put declarations in strange headers.
Intel x86 32 Solaris 5.9 gcc 3.3.2 SOLARIS-i86pc SOLARIS 8 October 2004 Posix build except that Sun put declarations in strange headers.
Intel x86 32 Free BSD 4.10-BETA gcc 2.95.4 FREEBSD-i386 9 October 2004
Intel x86 32 Net BSD 2.0.2 gcc 3.3.3 NETBSD-i386 17 January 2006
Intel x86 32 Open BSD 3.8 gcc 3.3.5 OPENBSD-i386 17 January 2006
Power PC 32 MacOS-X 10.2 gcc 3.1 MACOS-powerpc 21 June 2006 This is the first port to MacOS-X (OSX) and it works as a pure Posix build!
Power PC 64 Suse Linux 2.6 gcc 3.3.3 LINUX-ppc64 17 January 2006 IBM OpenPower Server

Note 1: The -D directive is a C macro that selects between different implementations of code for different platforms. For example, a Windows application will use different system calls to a Unix application. The correct directive for the platform must be defined for the STLplus library to build on the target platform. Typically this is set as an option to the compiler - for example with the gcc compiler you would specify "gcc -DSOLARIS" when building on Solaris. The _WIN32 value that selects the Windows native build is set automatically by the compilers so you don't have to do this. If no -D directive is shown, then the default build is a generic Unix build and needs no special rules. See the documentation on building the library for more on this.