Re: Why code your own library?

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Erik wrote:
> 
> 1) For fun. to see if you can do it ( Jeff Read said )

Well, a little - but that wasn't *my* motivation.

> 2) Functionality. What if I need to do something that none of the other
> libraries do too awefully well?

Yep - that's the main reason.
 
> 3) Learning. I don't code just to code. It's not just fun, it's educational. I
> like knowing how the joystick works or how linux's audio layer works or how...

Somewhat - although if there were already suitable libraries, I wouldn't
NEED
to learn that stuff.  I don't write my own sin() and cos() functions - I
don't
need to learn about how the math coprocessor works.
 
> 4) Proprietary use. Most of these api's are gpl'd or lgpl'd. If for some reason
> someone wanted to make a closed source game, they couldn't use the GPL'd stuff,
> and the LGPL'd stuff would require that library installed on the system. Mesa I
> can accept, but I don't want to install plib or sdk32 or whatever else for sound
> or joystick support, I want it to just plain work. If all games were open
> source, then it'd all be good, but most high quality games tend to be closed
> source and linux is an open source beasty :)

I don't buy that.  You use dozens of GPL/LGPL'ed libraries - Mesa,
glibc, libm,
etc, etc.  I suspect you are distinguishing between libs that come
pre-installed
on the OS in most distributions and those that don't.

PLIB is (I think) on SuSE 6.2 and will be on the next RedHat CD too.

Where do you draw the line?

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
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