@trekiej:
I would like to bring more programmers to the Amiga. The ability to bring code from other platforms seems to be a must these days.
Doing proper ports takes much more effort but the result is much more pleasant for both users and developers. I prefer quality rather than quantity. Typing "make" and porting cli linux tools to produce hundreds of ported cli tools that use ixemul doesn't help to make our platform interesting. Imagine that Fab never did a proper OWB*MorphOS*port or that Chris never did a proper Netsurf OS4 port... even if we could run SDL versions I highly doubt it would appeal users much.
It's better to invest more time porting correctly libraries making 1 proper shared library than producing a handful of static libs. As an user it's simply better and as a coder it presents advantages:
-if a library has a bug you can fix it without recompiling&relinking your main app.
-allows using different compilers:*this library may only compile with GCC4.x but another one perhaps can be compiled with GCC2.95 as GCC3 generates buggy code in some situations. You could even create a library using AmigaE for example and call it from C and the opposite too.
-allows more collaboration (using static libs could produce problems: what do you use? ixemul, libnix, clib2...?)
-allows using native library versions if available even if your app is 68k only
For amiga "portability" there are SDI headers, these are used in various amiga projects and make easier making native versions.
