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by jcelerier 1809 days ago
> People: write simple, portable code!

that does not work as soon as your users are on both windows and a unix-like platform and you are making a non-trivial app (for instance, an app with networking, audio, and video support).

A simple example: how do you share a GPU texture handle across multiple processes portably with a single code that works across windows / mac / linux's graphics APIs ?

2 comments

Trying to do that is a massive waste of time. It's legitimately easier to maintain separate codebases for each of the different platforms. The code that doesn't need to change can be a library. Or you use some super high level abstraction like Unity, Qt, JVM, Electron, React Native. Portability != cross-platform.
Yeah, now throw game consoles, embedded systems or classical mainframes into that mix as well.