D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] (Another rant) [Fwd: Microsoft shuts down Windows 98]

 

On Wednesday 12 July 2006 00:53, John Daragon wrote:
> I get the impression here that vanishingly
> few posters have experienced much in the way of serious software
> development in either Win32 or *[xX], and certainly not in both. The
> Win32 software architecture is a thing of beauty, .NET is amazingly well
> thought out, and programming threads under Linux after doing the same
> thing under Windows (from NT onwards) is a real pain.

i agree. minus the threads bit.  althouh i went from POSIX to NT, so find 
CreateThread* a bit odd - probabaly just what you're used to :-)

having written a cross platform (windows, linux, osx) application, i can say 
that linux was the biggest headache of them all.  Windows has a lovely 
abstracted API for network functions that in linux are far to complicated to 
perform because of the way it has evolved.  

Take for example soemhing that popped up tonight, an equivalent of 
GetBestInterface() in linux is non existant.  you'd instead have to either 
(a) read the entire routing table, or (b) use connected UDP trick - both of 
which are horrible hacks. perhaps i'll write an IP helper library for linux 
if only the kernel developers could unify drivers for things like media 
sensing.

On the plus side for linux, development tools are a lot easier for me to use 
(although i know many developers would say they prefer VS.NET).  We have a 
compile farm auto-compiling from SVN tags for all major glibc and stdc++ 
linux variants in use today, OS X, and windows (using CL + LINK.EXE under 
wine).  I rekon it's saved me many, many, many hours of development time by 
having that - something windows or osx could not offer.

what i've learnt over the years:

 * writing linux server applications is fun.
 * writing windows desktop applications is fun.
 * writing cross platform server or desktop applications is not fun.

.NET is a great concept, and a great implementation.  far better than java 
imo.

i can certainly understand why many major software vendors have not ported 
their applications to linux.  hopefully more will start using .NET so they 
work without wine.  ohh, wait, most the GUI API still needs wine.  ARGH! :p

 ~ Theo

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html