[MUD-Dev] Preference for host OS

[Bruce Mitchener]

Brian Hook wrote:

> I don't want this to get into a religious war, but I'm curious
> about anecdotal data when it comes to the preference in hosting
> operating systems.  I'm doing some preliminary research right now,
> and the obvious candidates seem to be:
 
>  - Windows NT/2000 Server (expensive)
>  - OpenBSD
>  - FreeBSD
>  - NetBSD
>  - various forms of Linux (RH,Debian,Mandrake,SuSE, etc.)
>  - Solaris (anyone bother?)
>  - OS X server (doubtful since hardware is very expensive)

Aside from Windows NT/2000 Server which I'm not very familiar with
at all, I believe strongly in software portability as far as running
on any unix goes.  I try to make sure that the software that I work
on builds and runs on as many OSes as I have access to.  Right now,
that is Linux with various versions of gcc and glibc (x86 and
occasionally Alpha), FreeBSD 3.2 and 4.2, OS X, Solaris7/SPARC, and
Cygwin.

Some unices, like AIX and HP-UX, have differences and oddities that
make them harder to support.  Some differences like those in
handling of shared libraries or details of threading, are a pain.
Other differences thoug, like 32bit vs 64bit, can be helpful in
tripping up bugs and invalid assumptions that have been made in your
code.

For something like Cold, this has been pretty simple.  For my work
on the TOM programming language (descendent of ObjC), this has been
much more complex (I still don't have it building on OS X yet).
But, in general, as long as you follow the Single Unix Specification
v2, you'll be fine on any modern Unix-like OS.

One reason to support Solaris with server software is that some good
tools are available for it that aren't on Linux or the BSDs, like
Purify and Quantify.

  - Bruce

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