[Gllug] More Microsoft patents

[Pete Ryland]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 02:26:12PM +0000, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 11:50:38AM +0000, Tethys wrote:
> > hard to beat for large projects. C++ and Java just don't do it for
> > me, I'm afraid. Both have some advantages over C, but neither have
> > sufficiently compelling advantages to warrant putting up with their
> > flaws. Just MHO...
> 
> A good OO model is worth a lot, though a depressing number of coders
> simply don't understand OO, which doesn't help.  Not that I'm claiming
> that either C++ or Java has one.

I actually like the way Java does OO and some other stuff, although it does
still lack a few things.  However, I did my undergraduate thesis on trying
to improve java runtime speed[1], and came to the conclusion that there's
little one can do due to "nice" features like late binding.  The irony is
that most of these things that slow Java down were designed to enable Java to
compile quicker, be portable, and be edited while the program is running.
Almost ten years after, and this dream has still not come to fruition. :(

C++ on the other hand, is a cumbersome language which (like Perl) has lots
of syntactic sugar which does a lot of stuff behind your back.  For example,
in C++, the dereference operator could be overloaded to do bounds checking.
This is all well and good, but it will still look in the code like a
dereference operator, which is normally a free operation (it usually just
affects the addressing mode of another operation) so anyone using said class
may get a nasty surprise when profiling even the simplest of code.  The
general rule that the source code resembles the compiled code is severly
disrupted.

And besides, there's nothing that any of these languages can do that can't
be done (easily) in C, including OO (just look at glib/gtk/gnome).

Pete

[1] I've long since taken down the web page for my thesis, but the Java
Decompiler I wrote for said thesis is still available for anyone interested
at http://pdr.cx/projects/hbd/ - it is written in C. :)
-- 
Pete Ryland
http://pdr.cx/

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