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Leaving .Net

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Re: Leaving .Net

#101

Post by wladimir »

keyle wrote: post #28
patrickaljord wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how you think of the open source world? A bunch of people writing jquery scripts for joomla? You may want to investigate a bit more (hint: google, facebook, yahoo and a bunch of other all rely on very solid and well documented high quality open source projects).

No it's not what I think of it, it's what I've been exposed to. I've done some open source projects myself, although that was in flex and nobody really picked up after me ;-) I'm a strong believer in Open source, I used open-bsd for years and I really enjoy Mono and Monotouch. However the state of 95% of open source project is rather dirty and messy, scruffy development.

And 95% of the commercial, closed source software is also crap. That has nothing to do with being open or closed source, good developers are rare, and so are good ideas.

Re: Leaving .Net

#102

Post by wladimir »

kenjackson wrote: post #43
gcr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The classic example is GCC which has probably 10x > more people working on it than any commercial > compiler, yet the Intel and MS C/C++ compilers > generally kill it. Oh? Interesting; I thought that gcc was one of the better ones. Could you elaborate?

GCC has generally had perf numbers that lag the commercial compilers. Although GCC has narrowed this gap recently as C/C++ has generally fallen out of favor by the major vendors (and commercial vendors aren't working much on raw C/C++ performance anymore).

On which benchmarks? Is this the case for both x86 and x86/64 targets? Do you have any specific reference?

Re: Leaving .Net

#103

Post by jacksonh »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #97
MikeW wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do NOT use the fastcgi server for ASP.NET. They are too unstable for use in production. Use mod_mono instead.

maybe you could help me. I don't want ASP.NET. All I want is a resident .NET program that gets called when an URL is visited, getting all the parms passed like CGI. I can handle the rest. I really don't want or need the ASP.NET stack. Is there some way to do this? So far all I have is a stand-alone program that gets loaded each time using Apache and CGI. Can't seem to figure out how to make it resident and re-entryab…

It sounds like what you are looking for is exactly what I am working on right now: https://github.com/jacksonh/manos/blob/master/docs/tutorial/...

Re: Leaving .Net

#104

Post by kenjackson »

bad_user wrote: post #91
kenjackson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm relatively new to web development, and I've never worked in an enterprise environment using enterprise software/frameworks, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone given the choice and assuming the cash is the same would choose to go the MS route. I admit naïveté. A lot of reasons. The big reason is that for a LOT of people, open source isn't all that compelling as a feature on its own. For certain classes of…

I agree with you but having to choose between 2 similar products, going with the one that's open-source is a no-brainer in most cases. If a lot of people don't go with that route is mostly because of inertia or just bad uninformed choices, the idiotic kind of stuff that can drag your company into the ground. It's not the license, it's the side effects: the ability to fix it yourself, community, popularity, documentat…

but having to choose between 2 similar products, going with the one that's open-source is a no-brainer in most cases.

Is it? First, you have to define "similar".

Would you rather have Quake (open source) or Black Ops? Both shooters with zombie like monsters.

Is MySQL the same as the SQL Server? Sure, to the uninitiated they look the same, but there are lots of little differences that, depending on your goals, can make one vastly more valuable than the other.

Would you prefer Mono or the CLR? While Mono has an enthusiastic and strong dev community, I bet dollars to donuts that even among informed devs, most would chose the CLR for the job at hand. And I bet even among informed CIOs they'd prefer the CLR for their shops.

OpenOffice Calc or Excel? Again, depending on your usage scenario, there are things you can do in Excel that simply aren't there in a reasonable way in Calc, although again, to the unitiated they're both spreadsheets.

My point? You rarely have the option of choosing between a closed source version and open source version of identical products. What you do tend to do is to look at two (or more products) and figure out what addresses your need the most, with open source being one of many metrics. When I decide which spreadsheet for my org to use, of course we consider OpenOffice, but the fact that it is open source has very little impact on our decision. The probability of us fixing a bug in OpenOffice is about equal to the chance that the bug fixes it self through the right sequence of bits being affected by cosmic ray. But maybe for you the fact that you can go and implement missing features in OpenOffice is important.

Re: Leaving .Net

#105

Post by treeface »

keyle wrote: post #54
treeface wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95%? Would you like to back that number up with anything? Even if I grant you that arbitrary statistic, it says nothing about the state of the selection developers have for open source projects. If 5% of all open source projects are good, that leaves an enormous quantity of good open source projects. What languages do you code in?

Point taken, 95% was a nerf gun guess. I write in C#, AS3, php, js, etc.

I code in as3, php, and js as well. What's your opinion of PHP open source frameworks like CodeIgniter, Kohana, and Symfony? Or perhaps, to take a language that I don't code in but is often lauded, RoR? Or, on the JS side, have you seen this:

http://javascriptmvc.com/

I'm very curious what your opinion (as a C# dev) is on these. My dad loves .NET (and I think rightly so), but often has (what I think to be) a bit of an outdated stance on open source that is mostly borne of a lack of knowledge of the extant options.

Re: Leaving .Net

#106

Post by kenjackson »

psadauskas wrote: post #74
kenjackson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCC has generally had perf numbers that lag the commercial compilers. Although GCC has narrowed this gap recently as C/C++ has generally fallen out of favor by the major vendors (and commercial vendors aren't working much on raw C/C++ performance anymore).

I think thats because GCC will compile anything anywhere. MS is only Windows platform, and ICC prefers Intel x86 CPUs. Since the other compilers didn't stand a chance to compete with GCC on portability, the only other thing they could compete with it on was performance. Since they focused on it, they should clearly be more performant in their niche.

Since the other compilers didn't stand a chance to compete with GCC on portability, the only other thing they could compete with it on was performance. Since they focused on it, they should clearly be more performant in their niche.

I think your skewed world view is apparent here. MS and Intel certainly didn't come and say, "One of our top priorities is portability. How can we target our compilers to platforms that we have nothing to do with? Oh wait, GCC already does that!"

Of course not. Honestly, GCC has been an afterthought for most of the history of C/C++. It's only now that it is effectively dead that GCC has started to become competitive. MS was focused on Borland for years (and it actually didn't generally revolve around perf, but generally build throughput). Likewise, Intel was focused on SPEC against xlc and other architecture specific compilers.

And as I said in another post, they (GCC, Intel, MS) have different priorities. If your goal is to have a somewhat portable C/C++ compiler then GCC is the way to go. If you want the best perf/throughput on a specific target then MS and Intel are your best choice.

Re: Leaving .Net

#107

Post by kenjackson »

bad_user wrote: post #79
kenjackson wrote: post #10

Dave has some reasonable points, and frankly I think MS is going where he'd like them to go. But he does miss the boat on a few things. One thing that I do think he discounts too much is the surprising effectiveness of small focused teams. In the same way a small startup is more effective than a lumbering machine, a small team of devs is often more effective than 1000 loosely organized volunteers. The classic example…

GCC which has probably 10x more people working on it than any commercial compiler Citation? Personally I think you pulled that figure out of your ass; especially since the GCC codebase is a mess (on purpose), it's been stable and good enough (and arguably stagnant) for quite a while and all attention shifts lately to LLVM. With relatively small developer teams, they've increased in quality as fast as any open source…

I just looked at the GCC contributors list and used an educated estimateof how many on various commercial compilers. I don't have exact numbers, which is why I said "probably".

And we aren't talking only about high-level ideas here, but actual implementation details.

Huh? What implementation details? Citation? Silverlight looks fundamentally different than any other product, except WPF. I'd love to see who their copying implementation details from.

Re: Leaving .Net

#108

Post by kenjackson »

MortenK wrote: post #98
huertanix wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mostly true, but the culture dominated even in a small, non-corporate startup that I worked for in Scottsdale. Once, a few of us were attempting to utilize the CSLA framework in our app, but as soon as the CFO caught wind of the required reading of third party docs, etc, he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the p…

"he stopped the effort dead in its tracks, because it would mean "having to learn something new," and that statement pretty much sums up the prevalent mentality in the .NET community." This is an over the top and even somewhat offending generalization. I don't know if all companies in Scottsdale are like this, but I can promise you that it's most definitely not the prevalent mentality in the .NET community nor in mos…

It's not so much offensive as contradictory.

"We were told we could not use 3rd party components, which sums up the prevalent mentality in the .NET community. So we did not use the popular 3rd party component CSLA, written Rocky Lhotka, a well respected member of the .NET community."

To make it clear... how can that mentality be THE prevalent mentality when there are these extremely popular third party components such as CSLA and Log4Net. They're popular because a LOT of .NET shops use them. They're extremely popular, because that mentality is not as common as you might think it is.

Re: Leaving .Net

#109

Post by kenjackson »

rbanffy wrote: post #88
kenjackson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To answer your question, probably not. icc has a long history of being less good on AMD processors, and almost certainly not on accident. With that said, they don't have a monopoly on x86 compilers. Microsoft's Visual C++ has been about equally good on both platforms and is far more dominant. But with that said, I'm sure you know, that's not really relevant to the discussion at hand :-)

So, the Intel's compiler trounces GCC when the code it emits run on certain x86 processors. And Microsoft's compiler does a much better job when the target runs on Windows on x86 processors. If we narrow the target enough, all comparisons become interesting. I am quite sure GCC will blow both Intel's and Microsoft's compilers out of the water when it comes to compile code for IBM mainframes. I am sure it's much bette…

And my blender makes better smoothies than GCC. So your point is that GCC is better at things that other tools aren't attempting at all? OK, good point.

Re: Leaving .Net

#110

Post by rbanffy »

kenjackson wrote: post #109
rbanffy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the Intel's compiler trounces GCC when the code it emits run on certain x86 processors. And Microsoft's compiler does a much better job when the target runs on Windows on x86 processors. If we narrow the target enough, all comparisons become interesting. I am quite sure GCC will blow both Intel's and Microsoft's compilers out of the water when it comes to compile code for IBM mainframes. I am sure it's much bette…

And my blender makes better smoothies than GCC. So your point is that GCC is better at things that other tools aren't attempting at all? OK, good point.

Your point was that GCC was not as good at specific things that are the sole focus of the products you mention. Intel's compiler only targets Intel's x86s and Microsoft's compiler only targets the (two or three) OSs Microsoft makes. It's not really an apples to apples comparison.

For me the Intel compiler makes sense in certain specific applications (many of my servers are not even x86), but the Microsoft compiler is absolutely worthless.

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