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Leaving .Net

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Re: Leaving .Net

#111

Post by rbanffy »

shortlived wrote: post #60
okaramian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing development with Rails on personal projects and while Netbeans isn't Visual Studio, it's still a pretty solid development tool. I also dig how the local Rails environment shows you every call that's being made, plenty of solid logging integration, etc. Also the gems and other libraries being open source and freely available is great, and Ruby crushes C# with regards to Metaprogramming if you're going…

> Netbeans isn't Visual Studio You can say that again. It's also way behind Eclipse. It's amazing how good an IDE can be when you have a large corporation behind it (I.e. MS or IBM).

Interesting... I prefer NetBeans for Java web and J2ME stuff.

Re: Leaving .Net

#112

Post by kenjackson »

rbanffy wrote: post #110
kenjackson wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My point was that GCC is not good at specific things that customers care about (and it is good at other things, but I'd argue these things are more niche, such as retargeting for custom embedded devices).

For example, code size, throughput, debugging, and optimization are all places that the Visual C++ compiler is superior than GCC. How many Windows games are written with GCC? How many top-tier Windows apps are written with GCC? If I'm writing a Windows C/C++ application, I'm going to either use Visual C++ or icc. I'll choose icc for code with lots of compute intensive loops or vectorization opportunity. VC is better when icache is an overriding concern.

Now that may not be what you do, but to say, "Who in their right mind writes programs for Windows?", I think says more about you than it does about the respective compilers.

Re: Leaving .Net

#113

Post by rbanffy »

kenjackson wrote: post #112
rbanffy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My point was that GCC is not good at specific things that customers care about (and it is good at other things, but I'd argue these things are more niche, such as retargeting for custom embedded devices). For example, code size, throughput, debugging, and optimization are all places that the Visual C++ compiler is superior than GCC. How many Windows games are written with GCC? How many top-tier Windows apps are writt…

From my point of view, Windows desktop software is a niche. It's a good, big and profitable one, but one I do not take part in. I agree Visual C++ is a great compiler for that specific target.

Still, there is a lot more to programming than desktop applications that run on x86 processors under Windows. And embedded ARM processors outnumber desktop x86s by a large margin. I carry at least three of them with me at all times.

Re: Leaving .Net

#114

Post by bry »

klochner wrote: post #44
bry wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like his blog was previously on Tumblr, so the dup-detector didn't catch it.

Not to be a jerk, but you didn't notice the "comments on hacker news" link at the bottom of the post?

Seriously? Clearly I didn't.

Re: Leaving .Net

#115

Post by kenjackson »

rbanffy wrote: post #113
kenjackson wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that GCC is not good at specific things that customers care about (and it is good at other things, but I'd argue these things are more niche, such as retargeting for custom embedded devices). For example, code size, throughput, debugging, and optimization are all places that the Visual C++ compiler is superior than GCC. How many Windows games are written with GCC? How many top-tier Windows apps are writt…

From my point of view, Windows desktop software is a niche. It's a good, big and profitable one, but one I do not take part in. I agree Visual C++ is a great compiler for that specific target. Still, there is a lot more to programming than desktop applications that run on x86 processors under Windows. And embedded ARM processors outnumber desktop x86s by a large margin. I carry at least three of them with me at all t…

And embedded ARM processors outnumber desktop x86s by a large margin. I carry at least three of them with me at all times.

And Visual C++ targets ARM also, and has for years. One of the reasons I've heard bandied about as to why WP7 first party apps are so fast and responsive is because of the quality of the Visual C++ compiler. :-)

Re: Leaving .Net

#116

Post by storm »

papertiger wrote: post #90
savoy11 wrote: post #71

Another day, another leaving .NET/Java for Ruby/Python post. This very link btw got posted twice, the first post was 3 months ago. Aren't you guys tired of that? We get it - HN is the place where people will go at great lengths to contribute/code all night rather than use something that works out of the box and juts move on. I am always surprised on the often hardcore technical problems discussed here and the relativ…

I wish I could downvote you.

I'd be interested to know why a contrary opinion honestly held and expressed deserves your downvote (or the 2+ it did get), or your pointless comment.

There is an HN Two Minutes Hate aspect to the steady march of "MS platforms stagnant / not supercool like the flavour of the week we're putting into production" posts getting voted into the front page. News about actual open source projects and cool stuff on C#/F#/.NET/Mono tends to languish / fail to hit front page, consistently. It's fair to call this out.

I'm not saying that open source is staggeringly vibrant and healthy on .NET, though it is making steady progress. I simply try to keep in mind that there is a whole wide world of workaday devs who punch a clock out there, and .NET has big reach into that world.

Re: Leaving .Net

#117

Post by rbanffy »

kenjackson wrote: post #115
rbanffy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my point of view, Windows desktop software is a niche. It's a good, big and profitable one, but one I do not take part in. I agree Visual C++ is a great compiler for that specific target. Still, there is a lot more to programming than desktop applications that run on x86 processors under Windows. And embedded ARM processors outnumber desktop x86s by a large margin. I carry at least three of them with me at all t…

And embedded ARM processors outnumber desktop x86s by a large margin. I carry at least three of them with me at all times. And Visual C++ targets ARM also, and has for years. One of the reasons I've heard bandied about as to why WP7 first party apps are so fast and responsive is because of the quality of the Visual C++ compiler. :-)

None of the ARMs I carry with me run WinMo or had binaries compiled with VC++. The odds of WinMo devices outnumbering competing devices are very slim.

But you surprised me now: wasn't WP7 managed code-only? Has MS decided to allow native app code?

Re: Leaving .Net

#118

Post by papertiger »

storm wrote: post #116
papertiger wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could downvote you.

I'd be interested to know why a contrary opinion honestly held and expressed deserves your downvote (or the 2+ it did get), or your pointless comment. There is an HN Two Minutes Hate aspect to the steady march of "MS platforms stagnant / not supercool like the flavour of the week we're putting into production" posts getting voted into the front page. News about actual open source projects and cool stuff on C#/F#/.NET…

Sure, it is fair to call this out and I am glad people are doing so. What I find off-putting is the way in which the commenter did so. There is clearly no interest in a civil discussion when someone suggests that the opposing side needs to "Grow up" and that their opinions are the result of a mid-life crisis.

As for my comment being pointless, I agree. Shame on me. Won't happen again.

EDIT: Upvoting you for busting me on my hypocrisy.

Re: Leaving .Net

#119

Post by Locke1689 »

wladimir wrote: post #102
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).

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

On pretty much all benchmarks -- just Google scholar search. We used GCC but only because it's portable. Performance wise on IA-32(e) GCC is {EDIT:Language} not as good.

Re: Leaving .Net

#120

Post by kenjackson »

rbanffy wrote: post #117
kenjackson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And embedded ARM processors outnumber desktop x86s by a large margin. I carry at least three of them with me at all times. And Visual C++ targets ARM also, and has for years. One of the reasons I've heard bandied about as to why WP7 first party apps are so fast and responsive is because of the quality of the Visual C++ compiler. :-)

None of the ARMs I carry with me run WinMo or had binaries compiled with VC++. The odds of WinMo devices outnumbering competing devices are very slim. But you surprised me now: wasn't WP7 managed code-only? Has MS decided to allow native app code?

Yes, the number of non MS-ARM devices is probably several of orders of magnitude more popular. But you'd be surprised at how many embedded devices run Windows CE.

Regarding WP7, 3rd party apps are managed. But the core OS is native and 1st party apps can be native. For example, IE and the mail app are both native C++ apps.

Honestly, I think allowing 3rd party native apps would be a mistake in general. Although I'd create a partners program where you require devs to pay $10k and then go through a certification process, which allows them to ship native apps. Basically its the XBox model. Indie devs use managed code. Apps that are willing to go through the more expensive process get native access.

Why? Native apps introduce a bunch of problems that are a pain to deal with. For example, there a bunch of security issues and stability issues that native apps introduce. Additionally you have to target native apps to an architecture. It may lock WP7 into ARM, due to the ecosystem, and block it from moving, for example, to a new Intel architecture.

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