16.3 Portability

We didn't worry about making the programs work with any C compiler; instead, we used GNU C extensions where they were useful. Likewise for GNU make.

We allowed ourselves this luxury because these programs are not historical utilities which people would expect to find on any Unix system. Rather, they are application programs. Perhaps having them work only with other GNU programs will encourage people to switch to GNU programs, or at least become aware of them.

It probably would not be too hard to change the programs to work with other ANSI C compilers. Changing them to work with old C compilers would be more painful. Thus far, the dependency on GCC hasn't proved a serious problem, because GCC runs on so many machines.

It would be dull but straightforward to write Makefiles for the programs which didn't use any of GNU make's special features. As with GCC, though, GNU make is so widely available that we haven't felt it necessary to do so.

The one exception is to this are the dozen or so files in the `lib' and `include' directories which implement the path searching algorithm. Because these files are shared with the TeX, Dvips, and XDvi distributions, they are written to work with old C compilers.

See section 2.2.1 Archives, for information on how to obtain GCC and the other programs mentioned. See section `Portability as it applies to GNU' in GNU Coding Standards, for more discussion of the portability of GNU programs in general.