Nick Hilliard said:
> It has to be said that Linux is particularly bad in this regard. Most other
> operating systems don't even get close to this level of silliness.
Yep -- that's the price of portability unfortunately -- and GNU C. Check
out the horrific number of standards supported by the glibc headers
(/usr/include/features.h).
Having said that I seem to recall Solaris was pretty bad as well, as it
had its own portability defines in the headers too... ;)
Basically it's a good thing for the stability of the libc code if the
headers are full of portability crud -- as it means that (hopefully) a
minimal amount of code is platform dependent and a maximum is shared
between platforms. But it's a bad thing for us people on the user end of
those headers and libs ;)
As a matter of interest -- what headers do you get that figure with? With
unistd.h, stdio.h and sys/types.h, the 3 most common hdrs I can think of,
with glibc 2.1.3, I get about 30k of headers, and 572 non-blank lines of
code/typedefs/prototypes -- from:
gcc -Wall -E tst.c | sed -e '/^ *$/d' -e '/^\#/d' | wc -l
--j.
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