On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 11:55:15PM +0530, M.R.Anand wrote:

Why is it that we keep bringing up the same old topic of windows vs linux from a user's point of view??

Ask the people who do bring it up. I really shouldn't respond to this FUD any more.

I've programmed for/on windows before (dont flame me for this) and would

No, not at all. Unless they were crappy re-inventions of wheels. I just love seeing a dozen new IRC clients on freshmeat (and that's usually done on a *nix of some kind, in PHP to boot, so don't tell me I'm bashing Windows).

really like to know how linux compares to M$ on the development front.

It compares much better, as I can write useful production code without having to pay someone hundreds of dollars. I do this for a living, too. Oh, and the code is usually plain text so you can hack with a text editor and don't need an IDE-- though you can get those, too. Actually vim's syntax highlighting and other programmer-friendly features do it for me. Emacs has similar stuff, which I'm not qualified to comment on as I don't use it. This isn't an invitation to a vi/emacs flamewar. Use whatever you want, fuck off, and let me use what I want. I think that lasts entence pretty much sums up the *nix developer's philosophy. Except maybe the "fuck off" part.

It would be really usefull if someone could throw some light on - dll, COM, windows api equivalents on GNU/Linux.

DLL is just an acronym for dynamic link library. On the *nix side you get libraries (lib*.so), modules (*.pm. *.py?), etc.

I don't know about COM but if you tell me what class of thing it is I might have an equivalent.

There are dozens of different APIs, all open. Depends on what you want to do. *tk, SDL, umm...

I doubt there exist a common api (for GUI) since there r different options available for different window managers. But then again x server

Yes, choice is good. Then again gtk runs on pretty much any window manager, right? How about SDL? Of course we're talking graphical APIs here. There's also the basic C API, which is what you really want, I think. There's no one unified API where you get gFunction_names_like_This. Oh wait, you do in gtk.

Also i'm aware about python and java which allow the program to be platform independent, but i'm looking at equivalent to M$ technologies here.

Look, as long as you want something that's exactly like MS, you're going to get MS. Linux is different. It's no good sitting in a Maruti 1000 and saying it's not exactly like a Maruti 800.

(ObDilbert: Please don't be sidetracked by the analogy.)

Since Linux was not designed ground up as a replacement to windows but infact unix (did i get my facts right?) so there is bound to be some

Yes.

difference in the structure or api or whatever its called (i think its

Yes.

called the programming model...??), thats the difference i'm looking to understand.

Yes. Good. There is a difference. Live with it.

PS: "users" never learn untill they lose their precious data, so till then let em keep using M$.