[MUD-Dev] Re: Real-world skills

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2001 17:09:04 -0700, J C Lawrence <claw at 2wire.com> wrote:

> <<I've always rather liked the way that MS has rephrased the
> language such that its a "Windows platform" and everything else is
> an "OS" or "system".  So delightfully fuzzy.>>

Marketing. Platform sounds like a nice place to sit down and have
lunch.  O/S and system, on the other hand, can be frightening to the
non-technical. Microsoft also refers to the "Windows family", which
is another nice warm fuzzy kind of thing to say.

And technically, Windows *isn't* an O/S. It's an O/S plus a whole
bunch of other shit -- the shell, the drivers, the interface layers
-- which is integrated very tightly with the O/S. Just like UNIX,
really, but UNIX has a very *loose* integration and tells you
exactly where the line is... so Windows doesn't exactly want to
invite those comparisons.  Otherwise you'd start to notice that the
line in UNIX is nice and straight and clear with the kernal on one
side and the utilities on the other -- while the line in Windows
wanders all over the place, is often blurred, sometimes has great
whopping gaps in it, and the utilities are thrown around haphazardly
on both sides of the line. ;)

> Given care in managing/handling your symbol table dependencies
> (its a questions of clean graph disjoints) under *nix you can use
> the dlopen () and dlclose() calls to arbitrarily load/remove/swap
> shared objects.

I've never worked with shared objects on UNIX, so I'm a little
surprised it's this easily mapped. Sounds roughly the same as
working with Windows DLL resources, so it should be easy to
conditionally compile this; the usual process under Windows is to
LoadLibrary() the DLL, FindResource() and LoadResource() the
resources, then FreeLibrary the DLL. It looks like this approach
would work almost identically in UNIX, and could even be handled
with an extra C++ file that appropriately implemented those four API
calls in UNIX terms.

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