Re: [INTERFACES] Re: ODBC 16 bit support

The Hermit Hacker wrote:
>
> On Sat, 18 Apr 1998, Byron Nikolaidis wrote:
>
> > Now that said, on my own time over the weekend, I will look into what it
> > would take to make the current driver support win3.1. But if it turns
> > out that it would degrade the performance of the driver for 32bit or
> > require major rework, I would probably have to say, it would be best to
> > have 2 separate drivers.
>
> And I've have to say a *definite* no here...the result of that
> would be two different drivers, with different features available to
> it...totally unacceptable.

Not totally, I like working drivers.

Despite what Microsoft tries to tell you Win16 and Win32 are two quite
different OSes.

I think that it would be easier to have a unified Win32/UNIX ODBC driver
than to keep the sources for Win16 and Win32 together (and get some
benefit out of it)

For me, having a fast and working 32 bit driver and mostly broken 16 bit
driver is much better than having 16 and 32 bit drivers both mostly
broken, even though tha last one is closer to giving us two similar
drivers with similar features <grin>.

> That would be like taking our 32bit vs 64bit server and saying
> that since nobody many ppl are using 64bit right now, we're going to get
> rid of those features that are currently broken, instead of trying to
> address them.

Actually not, as 64bit is something that we will have to adress some day
anyhow, and it also gives an extra test for some aspects of code quality
(maybe;)

> Quite frankly, this whole thread is starting to cause me to
> reconsider my decision to move away from the old driver over to this new
> driver... *sigh*

Have you ever tried to use the old driver ?

Or are you just talking about general principles ?

In principle I like the idea of having both 16 and 32 bit driver and
having a common source for them, but if this produces broken drivers and
no progress in fixing them (just complaints that nobody is sending
patches) then I still think that your decision to move away from the old
one was right.

It may still be a good idea to bring it back as a 16 bit solution. The
workarounds required in very limited memory situations that the 16 bit
driver has to live in may be fundamentally different than in the 32 bit
one. For example it might be easier to have the current 32bit driver run
on the unix side and have just 16-bit proxy functions run in the client
(somewhat like the Openlink crowd is doing it).

Then later, when we get a real ISO/ANSI compatible CLI (Call Level
Interface), we may put something thinner than a whole ODBC driver in the
server.

Hannu