Leif Stensson, Lysator @ Pike developers forum wrote:
"Leif Stensson, Lysator" wrote: To elaborate a bit on that: supporting an unusual operating system doesn't just support that OS. It also helps in other ways, for example:
Agreed. But it would help if either: a. Supporting it requires defensive coding, so that it works on all platforms unaltered. b. Or, if not a, then the private code for this platform is at least excercised once every six months.
There is mostly code of type b (ifdeffed, near duplicates), and if people don't compile it for over a year, it becomes cumbersome at best to make sure it still works (the corrective effect on the other code slowly fades).
Some of AmigaOS code is shared with NT/Windows, incidentally. So that portability-enabling effect is still there.