Hacker News Reader

Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you realize just how different even various Linux distros running even the same kernel can be, and I think you're giving waaay too much credit to OSX/Linux for being "alike". MAKE build scripts have notoriously been a mess for decades because of the differences between distros.

Any reasonable language has the ability to query all of the platform-specific stuff directly from the standard library. You can't even count on two Windows users having their home directories in the same place, or two Arch users having all of their config files in the same place. It's a necessity to be able to abstract all of these away even for a single operating system, which means you get it for free when moving to other operating systems.

View on HN

I do get that. I totally understand all OSes are very different. How often those differences surface really depends on a lot of things, mostly at what level of the OS you are working in. Node modules and apps tend to stay pretty high level. But again, I still stand by my original statement that Windows specific issues crop up more than any other OS. Just take a look at the README for node-gyp: https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp -- yup in OSX you have to get Xcode and a few other OSX specific steps to arrive at gcc and make, but compare that to the Windows section ...

There is no reason building Windows software has to be this hard, other than the maintainer just not putting even a reasonable amount of effort into it.

When developers are hostile torwards Windows, this is the result. This doesn't do anything to Microsoft, this just hurts other developers and users.

gyp was created by Google for building Chrome. I would guess they've put a decent amount of effort into it.

Other projects have to do a lot of work to support OS X too. So I guess I still don't see your point. Electron, for instance, had to program an entirely different object model to represent OS X's kludgy global menu bar when every other OS has menus attached to application windows.

I can't believe your defending OS X though when Apple makes you buy a whole computer from them to use it...meanwhile I can run a 6 month trial of Windows (over and over again) on any virtual machine. Honestly, it's way more work to support OS X than Windows if you really bother to look at it.

Apple is definitely not innocent here. They force a lot of terrible decisions too. I think ultimately though, this conversation boils down to my bias and experience versus your bias and experience.

Sure, everybodys bias is painfully obvious here on HN.

But I don't think that negates the fact that to develop anything at all for OS X I have to buy a whole computer from Apple, since it's damn near impossible to get a stable OS X experience by running it in a VM or directly on non-Apple hardware. Furthermore, remotely accessing Xcode on a Mac from a non-Mac computer is really painful since the only option is VNC - the bottom of the barrel, lowest common denominator of remote screen sharing protocols.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com