Re: To the moderator

In article <354b418f.30735565_at_news.demon.co.uk>

           eric_at_deptj.demon.co.uk "Eric Junkermann" writes:

>On Mon, 27 Apr 98 23:56:27 GMT, fred_at_genesis.demon.co.uk (Lawrence
>Kirby) wrote:
>
><snip>
>>I doubt whether the Oracle libraries could be written entirely in terms
>>of the standard C library. The problem is that that doesn't provide
>>any locking or other means to create serialisation mechanisms. Also
>>performance tends to be mportant for databases so commercial DBMSs tend to
>>make use of whatever platform-specific magic is available to squeeze out
>>that last bit of performance.
><snip>
>
>Oracle runs on just about everything (except AS/400 (I know, there are
>other exceptions)) so, like anything else properly written to be
>portable, has a system-dependant layer. This layer would be written
>for some system by the original developers, and then handed to porters
>with comments like "do this the safest way you can", or "do this the
>fastest way you can" (or both). Anything above that layer has to be
>totally portable,

The point is that it is *not* totally portable. It is only portable to those C compilers that have the Oracle library available, not to mention installed. I suspect that this is a rather small minority of all C compilers out there. However even if the library was available for every C compiler code that uses it would still not be strictly portable since the C language doesn't define the interface - it is still possible for a conforming C compiler to exist without the libraries installed or a library that uses the same names but does something completely different.

Portable C code means something very specific.

-- 
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Lawrence Kirby | fred_at_genesis.demon.co.uk
Wilts, England | 70734.126_at_compuserve.com
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