Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2773 mails)

[jbarnett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jack Barnett)]

I think something needs to be said about portability.

When the x86 dies, so does all your program, and so does your 6 years of
study hard core x86 asm, it all gets flushed.

C/C++ for example, you have to tweak a couple pieces of code and BAM it runs
on any CPU/OS.  Think about it, what if Sendmail or Bind was coded in ASM
for some God awful slow processer of the day?  Think the
programmers/maintains could have eaily ported these programs to varies
differant platforms.  Most of the time to get Sendmail or Bind running on a
decent Unix, is to run the command `./configure; make; make install`

The only reason in my mind that Unix is still alive is because for it's
portability.  It is easier to goto ftp.gnu.org and get a C compiler for your
machine, and then do a `make`; then to rewrite thousands of lines of ASM for
a Sparc under Solaris to the X86 CPU under Linux.

Sure ASM is fast, and sure it is the only way you can do certain things, but
it is a dog to code and even harder to port.

C/C++ and very good, they are semi-low level launage, where you can access
certain things directly, and sure it is easy to port, even more so between
Unix to Unix.

Java is highly compatiable between platforms, you should only have to
compile the program once, and it is byte code compatiable among all
machines.  The bad thing about java is that you can't access some low level
things like C can.  Plus Java is EXTREMLY SLOW!

Perl is a powerful scripting lanauge and should be able to port between all
platforms (especially Unix) with nothing more than changing the first line
where it tells it to find the Perl interpurter.

Shell scripts are great, but it is really more for system admin types then
/REAL/ programmers.  I use shell scripts ALOT : )

Ever try to write a CGI script is Ultra Sparc ASM?  Me neither, but it
/sounds/ so painful.

Jack

----- Original Message -----
From: Troy Denkinger <troy@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: SuSE <suse-linux-e@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, December 23, 1999 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: [SLE] Choosing a programming language ( Offtopic/maybe )

> At 11:21 AM 12/23/99 -0500, Sam Carleton wrote:
> >You are correct, often what someone codes in C++ can be coded in another
> >language
> >much faster.  There are many times that coding speed is what is
> >important.  But
> >the C++ code, if coded well, out preform the other language everytime.
>
> [snip]
>
> Oh, yes, no doubt about this.  It pretty much goes without saying that the
> lower you go the faster your program _can_ become.  Thankfully, todays
> faster machines mean you can get away without eeking out the last morsel
of
> speed.  Not to mention with so much programming going on in environments
> with lots of latency (internet development) speed of the executable
becomes
> less of an issue.
>
> >P.S.  I have done some C/C++ based CGI scripts in my past.  With
languages
> >like
> >PHP and the other scripting languages, I will never write another CGI
> >script in
> >C/C++!  (unless I need to do something low level where C/C++ is the only
way)
>
> Oy, I tried writing CGI in C++ once.  Once.  I found it too frustrating.
>
> So, the point of this is.  When choosing a programming language there are
> lots of tradeoffs that need to be weighed including the target environment
> requirements, maintainability requirements, marketing requirements (yep),
> blah, blah, blah, etc.
>
> Take care,
>
> Troy Denkinger
>
>
>
>
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>


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