The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Good Article on Xen (X#)

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6042

Lots of code examples.

All your base are belong to us
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Oh God I'm so excited -- Microsoft, with a huge list of market failures behind them, is going to come out with something. I'd better put everything down to get ready for this.

.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

I think they better fix that slow piece of s*hit .NET CLR runtime first, before wasting time inventing new languages for it.

A 30 second start up for an app on a 3GHz box is unacceptable from a customer's point of view. I'm not talking about their little demo applets. I'm talking normal sized apps like SharpReader (RSS aggregator).

Native code (VC++/MFC) is still the way to go. Even VB (not VB.NET) is still better than anything .NET

Bill
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

The 30 second startup doesn't bother me so much as the 70M of ram apps seems to take.

Dan Brown
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

? ? ? All your base are belong to us ? ? ?

Cognitive Linguist
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

"All your base" is from the title sequence to an old SNES (i think) game. The translation budget from Japanese to English was not the highest, but they tried.

Watch an animated gif of it here :
http://www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/story.shtml

Colin Overton
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Nope not the SNES, it was the Megadrive (Genesis int the USA). Must read link before posting it ;)

Colin Overton
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

>> A 30 second start up for an app on a 3GHz

30 seconds? Oh my.

I thought I didn't like *Java* because of that.

Alex.ro
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

I clicked my Joel On Software bookmark but my browser brought up Slashdot.

Nate Silva
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

> A 30 second start up for an app on a 3GHz box is
> unacceptable from a customer's point of view. I'm not
> talking about their little demo applets. I'm talking normal
> sized apps like SharpReader (RSS aggregator).

There might be something that needs tuning on your machine.

Sharp Reader (0.9.3.1) comes up in less than 3 seconds on my box with a lowly AMD 1800 CPU.

Is the CPU at 100% for the full time?

Rob Walker
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

"lowly AMD 1800 CPU"

that's pretty funny.

Dan Brown
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

After a quick look at the article I can't help noticing the similarity of the approach with the good old Cold Fusion. Of course Cold Fusion did not know what XML is, however there was a pretty nice syntax for embedding database data without using recordsets.
In the comments to the article I noticed that other people noticed similarities with other languages.
I did not understand whether X# provides all the goodies of the C# syntax. If it is an extension of C# to handle XML and SQL databases, without recordset objects and XML Readers, then great. If it is a crippled C#, then it’s not so great.
I will definitely follow the development of the language.
BTW is there anything similar in the Java world?

Alexander Chalucov (http://www.alexlechuck.com)
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

I hate... hate... hate... HATE people doing stuff like this:

blah blah blah {
blah blah
}

WHY?! WHY?! It is clearer and more readable this way:

blah blah blah
{
blah blah
}

What if you have a very long IF statement with multiple conditions?

blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
{
blah blah
}

It is clearer!

T.J.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Anyone who bring up a point that it would squeeze more code in 2 screenful of code have obviously not used any real IDE tool.

-T.J.

T.J.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004

>> lowly AMD 1800 CPU

that's pretty lowly.

Alex.ro
Wednesday, February 18, 2004

>>> lowly AMD 1800 CPU
> that's pretty lowly.

64 bit mobile athlon marked as 3000+ is running at 1.8 GHz. And it's still faster then the 3GHz P4 for most applications (except multimedia, maybe). Compliation is twice as fast as on similarily configured P4 1.7 GHz.

Alexander Chalucov (http://www.alexlechuck.com)
Wednesday, February 18, 2004

The ram usage is a hard problem. Welcome to the kitchen-sink school of library design plus garbage collection.

Regarding .NET he start-up time, please take a look at ngen.exe. You can generate a native image of the .NET assembly. This may improve start-up times. Native generation can be done as part of the install. Do a google search, or look in MSDN. Obviously, the image is going to be bound to the platform it was generated on.

Synder
Thursday, February 19, 2004