This Starboard sub-project contains libraries and headers that can be used to make porting client software on top of Starboard a little easier.
Before Starboard, we had tried to build a POSIX emulation layer for every platform we wanted to support. This meant replacing link symbols in some cases, and a wielding global preprocessor macros in others. It was impossible to keep inclusion of platform headers (e.g. winsock.h) from transitively leaking out into common code.
poem, for POsix EMulation, is somewhat similar, but a surgical tool for targeted porting, rather than a blunt instrument. Because we have Starboard as a well-defined barrier, we can use the preprocessor to selectively redirect standard functions like malloc to Starboard without making lots of changes to the code.
The rule we use is that these headers must ONLY be included in implementation files, not headers, so that the preprocessor replacements don't spread uncontrollably.
For each poem, we try to name files in a consistent, formulaic manner. With this scheme, we can easily determine the correct poem header while porting. This can also come handy if one were to write a script to assist in porting third party libraries. In theory, the script would just look for includes in .cc files, where we have available poems and then wrap unprotected includes in #if !defined(STARBOARD), and include the poems if STARBOARD is defined.
Starboard does not contain functions that do much in the way of time conversion. This is because system-provided time manipulation is often buggy, broken, and/or limited. eztime is a simplified Straight-C wrapper on top of ICU and Starboard that makes it easy to replace calls to functions like mktime and gmtime in older C libraries with more robust ICU calls.
EzTime can be used directly by including starboard/client_porting/eztime/eztime.h, or you can include starboard/client_porting/poem/eztime_poem.h in your implementation file to automatically simulate POSIXy time functions.