Portability libraries/frameworks [closed]

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I have the book "Write Portable Code" which details POSH, an open-source "framework" (mostly just a header) to help with portability of C/C++ code between different platforms and hardware.

Since Poshlib hasn't had an update in 5 years now, I was wondering what other similar libraries/frameworks exist out there?

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For C code, GLib is a modern cross-platform (non-GUI) library which makes it easy to write applications that run on many different platforms without source code changes. GLib is actively developed in an open manner as part of the GNOME project with lots of open source projects using it.

For C++ I would suggest looking at the Boost libraries.

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Dear Shaggy Frog,
While I remain largely incurious about your handle, I must say that this is something of a hairy issue. Here's why. I work with the boost libraries day in and day out. They're fantastic, and make innumerable tasks way easier. But I must emphasis that if you use them, you need to use a profiler. Some of the really nice portions of it tend to be a bit slow, and you should definitely read up on best-practices before using certain parts like, say, transform iterators. Boost, though, is worth mentioning because it does make an effort to supply some pretty powerful pieces of abstraction that are almost foreign in the ++cverse.

However, Boost, and other frameworks like it, are not snakeoil. They rock. People who rock use them. People who rock work on them. For more specialized tasks, I'd need to know more about your problem domain. However, one other tool that's really excellent is SWIG, which will let you bundle up any hunk of portable C code into a library that's... well.... accessible.

As for bloat, a lot of that is going to go away when C++0x moves to the standard, thanks to variadic templates, and a number of similar pieces of cleverness. Honestly, I'm tired of people yelling about The Terrors Of Templates. Perhaps six years ago they were a danger due to poor compiler support, but these days, they're part of the language. They live under almost every piece of generic code you touch. Projects like CLang are hammering the very last nails into this coffin as we speak. They aren't a fad anymore. They aren't a magical solution. No one still thinks that. No one you should hire, anyway.

The future approaches. Do you need a Boost?

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Most libraries with the buzzwords "portability framework" or "portable runtime" in their names are useless bloat and snake oil. If you want to write portable code, start with the relevant standards and follow them. Instead of reading your vendor's man pages or help files for standard library functions, read the ISO C or C++ standard or POSIX standard. And so on.

Aside from highly crippled embedded systems (note: many/most embedded systems do not fall into the "highly crippled" category) and DSPs, pretty much any environment can be made to be POSIX conformant. A much better approach than trying to design or find a new "portability framework" on top of diverse and incompatible underlying systems is to evaluate what parts of POSIX you need to get the job done, what parts might be missing or non-conformant on systems you're interested in, and whether there are drop-in replacements or workarounds for the missing or broken functionality.

For most people, the only relevant non-POSIX system is Windows. Cygwin is one heavy-weight option for making Windows conform to POSIX, but if you code to a more-inclusive subset of POSIX, you can get by with much lighter solutions and still support Windows.

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There is similar Predef project on sourceforge, but it are not updated for several years also.

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FWIW, the predef pages are actively maintained and have been continuously updated over the last several years.

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Aside from Boost, which all C++ programmers should be familiar with, there are several libraries worth looking at. STLSoft is the first one that comes to my mind.

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I have prepared a list of some prominent portability libraries for C and C++ on my personal web site. One can freely reuse it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. I had some experience with Qt, GLib, and the Apache Portable Runtime, and they all seemed to have been mostly OK.

There is also another list on the wikipedia.