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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

I can still remember an old conference when Microsoft bragged that running windows-only allowed them to remove 20-30% of the Sybase code base as they didn't need the cross-platform cruft.

It would be interesting to see how they code for cross platform portability now.

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Apparently they ship it together with Windows as library OS:

https://twitter.com/TobiasSQL/status/798937457916002304

>The Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL) powering @SQLServer on #Linux evolved from the MSFT Research Drawbridge project

So Microsoft Wine? Part of the way there?

If I understand correctly, this is not even a compatibility layer like Wine. This is literally a part of the Windows kernel and userspace, running entirely inside Linux userspace.

That was probably both true, and slightly misleading. I remember a talk on Drizzle (a MySQL fork looking to clean up and streamline the system after Oracle's buy) years ago where they touted similar numbers in code reduction by dropping support for all non POSIX or edge case OS's other than Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X (and that last one might have been added later). That is, they ripped out the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris and Windows specific code (and possibly more). Sybase looked to support a similarly diverse group of operating systems[1], so there were probably a lot of gains to be had even if they didn't remove all POSIX support.

1: http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybas...

IIRC, they have since adopted an OS/FS shim to be able to make porting like this generally easier... that said, there are certainly a lot of edge case features that need to be tested... I'd be surprised if there wasn't an effort to bring an electron based Management Studio for cross-platform usage. Which would be pretty damned cool...

The `tedious` package in node, makes it a drop dead simple db to use cross platform... Compared to say the beast that is Oracle, I haven't used db2 from node so can't compare there.

Probably some variation of https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/tree/master/src/pal . I know it's also used for something else relating to VS but I forget what.

I'm pretty certain its still written in C++ not dotnet.

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