Re: [boost] [afio] AFIO review postponed till Monday

Subject: Re: [boost] [afio] AFIO review postponed till Monday
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-07-22 20:27:17

On 22 Jul 2015 at 22:01, Asbjørn wrote:

> Still, with temporary solutions/applications having a habbit of becoming 
> permanent solutions[1], it still seems to me that the reliance on NT kernel API 
> rather than just Win32 may stop it to work earlier than a pure Win32 application.

Ah sorry, you may not be aware that once upon a time the NT kernel 
had a POSIX subsystem which sat parallel to the Win32 and OS/2 and 
DOS subsystems [1].

This is how AFIO achieves its much closer to POSIX semantics than is 
possible in Win32 - by skipping Win32, and using the same NT kernel 
API as the subsystems use. Mingw, and Cygwin, do exactly the same 
trick BTW and it's how they achieve better POSIX conformance than 
MSVCRT can.

In other words, AFIO's choice of using the NT kernel API was never a 
temporary solution. It was an original design choice from the very 
beginning because Mingw forces you to buy further into their 
ecosystem than many users want or need just to gain the improved 
POSIX filesystem semantics.

Niall

[1]: 
http://brianreiter.org/2010/08/24/the-sad-history-of-the-microsoft-pos
ix-subsystem/
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