[fpc-devel] OS aware RTL proposal

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006, Marco van de Voort wrote:

>> http://www.freepascal.org/wiki/index.php/OS_aware_RTL
>>
>> Tell me what you think
>
> First: only Linux has the main problem. BSD never renumbers ABI calls, newer
> abi calls have a different prototype.

This is manifestly wrong:

Sure, there are new syscall numbers in linux, but the old numbers
still work as they always have. Proof:

The current set of numbers already works since 10 years.

I'm not saying you'll have the latest features with the old numbers,
but that is irrelevant.

Windows has the same issue. For almost each and every OS XYZ call,
there is a XYZex call. It's normal if you want to maintain backward
compatibility, but also want to give new version numbers.

IMHO all we need to do is to decide which call (number) we want to
use, and warn people that some things may not work on older systems.

Michael.