On 2006-10-09, Robert Ramey <ramey@rrsd.com> wrote:
I would make one small change to the above statement - removing the word "standard" so tha tit reads
The deciding factor often seems to be the availability of a [standard] lib (Java, .Net).
I see very successful libraries - MFC - totally non portable that are successful because they provide the right toolkit for the job. The fact that they are not standard hasn't been relevant.
Yes, the majority of the market place doesn't care about the difference between standard and de-facto standard. But achieving true de-facto standard status means your library must ship with the development environments used by the majority of users. In practice the only way to achieve de-facto standard level market penetration is to in fact to become standardized [*] Just look a the level of STL adoption before it was *both* standardized and shipped by Microsoft. Steve [*] Unless of course you happen to have an OS monopoly.