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Tips for stable and portable software

begriffs.com

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Re: Tips for stable and portable software

#5

Post by fjfaase »

One day, maybe when I am retired, I am going to develop a programming language-agnostic algorithm specifying language with which you can generate code for programming languages ;-). A kind om Mathematica, but than for software.

Re: Tips for stable and portable software

#7

Post by ut6Ootho »

This article certainly rings a bell, as I started rewriting my personal projects to C in the last year, precisely because I wanted to make them decades-proof. I still use the same vimscripts I wrote in early 2000', I want the same thing for all my tooling and apps.

I'm not sure it makes sense professionally, though, as most codebase won't survive a decade : after three years, the dev team will turn over, and the new team will want to rewrite everything from scratch. Or start rewriting parts of the exisiting system in a new language, until it ultimately eat it up. It may be related to the kind of companies I work with, though (very early stage startups).

Regarding interfaces, I think the author could have gone a step further. There is actually a standard and portable interface system: html/js/css. If you write a dependency free web app using things like webcomponents and other standard techs, you know it will stand time, and it actually matches all the reason why the author want to use C : standard and multiple implementations.

Re: Tips for stable and portable software

#8

Post by CJefferson »

I've currently involved with a system, written in C, which has been going for 30 years: GAP - https://www.gap-system.org

While I write a lot of C, I immediately disagree with the idea that C has a "simple (yet expressive) abstract machine model". Every so often we find a bug which has been present for over a decade, because some new compiler has added a (perfectly legal by the standard) optimisation which breaks some old code.

Picking one example: in the "old days", it was very common (and important for efficiency) to freely cast memory between char, int, double, etc. For many years this was fine, then all compilers started keeping better track of aliasing and lots of old code broke.

Also, while POSIX is a nice base, it stops you using Windows, and also almost every non-trivial program ends up with a bunch of autoconf (which has to be updated every so often) to handle differences between linux/BSD/Mac.

Also, definatly don't distribute code where you use flags like '-pedantic', as it can lead to your code breaking on future compilers which tighten up the rules.

Re: Tips for stable and portable software

#10

Post by user5994461 »

ut6Ootho wrote: post #7

This article certainly rings a bell, as I started rewriting my personal projects to C in the last year, precisely because I wanted to make them decades-proof. I still use the same vimscripts I wrote in early 2000', I want the same thing for all my tooling and apps. I'm not sure it makes sense professionally, though, as most codebase won't survive a decade : after three years, the dev team will turn over, and the new…

It's highly dependent on the domain.

If you're in a web startup, software won't last 3 years, the next team will systematically rewrite.

If you're in the bank, logistics, defense sector, it's very likely the software will go for a decade, as long as it's not killed the first or second year for being a pet project (initial manager left) and having no customer.

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