Sun Aug 15 20:47:42 BST 2010
In doing some research into file locking in Linux I recently stumbled upon Jeremy Allison's interesting essay A Tale of Two Standards. In it he explores the history of the POSIX and Win32 standards and examines the successes and failures in both.
To my chagrin, reading Jeremy's essay made me realise that I wasn't going to be able to make use of any POSIX file locking in my code. Even as I mourned this loss, however, his descriptions of the vagueness of some of the Win32 specification made me feel grateful I am no longer compelled to program for Windows platforms.