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Portable C++ by Patricia Giencke Recommended

ISBN: 0-07-024124-4)       Publisher: McGraw-Hill       Pages: 236pp       Price: £30-95

Categories:   portability     advanced c++

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 8-5 (Jul 1996)

If you envisage your work being moved to other platforms you need to take this into account from the start. Think how difficult Microsoft would find porting DOS /Windows 3.1 to any CPU that was not part of the 80x86 family. The product was not designed and coded with portability in mind (compactness and speed were more important in the early 1980's). On the other hand Windows NT has been designed for porting to other platforms (unfortunately performance tweaking at the coding stage lost some of the advantage).

The importance of porting is not just supporting multiple platforms at the same time but recognising that if you have a good product you will need to port it to a new platform at a later stage. If you are among the majority of programmers who use MS Visual C++ you already know just how badly your choice of tools can effect your work. Moving from 16-bits to 32-bits will always require some work but when that is compounded by substantial changes in the compiler your task is made much more difficult.

Patricia Giencke (she remembers to tell the reader how to pronounce her name--Ginky) covers the ground from design through implementation with chapters on both MSWindows and Unix. Hers is a highly readable book which covers things at a high level. She is not telling you what to do. She highlights the problems that you must consider when choosing your methodology, tools and coding methods.

At other times she gives specific tips anyone of which can be worth the price of the book. For example when talking about C++ and DLL s in the context of MS Windows she instructs you to cut the names from the .MAP file and paste them to the .DEF file.

Not all her tips will remain useful as compiler technology continues to develop so you must read with thought and understanding. If you can do this and need to write applications either for many platforms or for a long lifetime reading this book will quickly repay the cost in time and money.