> Of course, functions returning funny ints on errors are
> non-ideal, an exception is better,

C++ has had exceptions since the ARM days.

>as well as some form of
> finally... :-(

finally is needed in languages that do not have deterministic object destruction. C++ deterministic destructors are a far superior method for cleaning up resources:

http://calculist.blogspot.com/2010/06/raii-vs-finally.html

> > Of course, functions returning funny ints on errors are
> > non-ideal, an exception is better,
>
> C++ has had exceptions since the ARM days.

But as they weren't used by any of the standard libraries of the day, little was gained from them. There were also implementation restrictions (like not being able to use them in DLLs).

> > C++ has had exceptions since the ARM days.
>
> But as they weren't used by any of the standard libraries
> of the day, little was gained from them. There were also
> implementation restrictions (like not being able to use
> them in DLLs).

You mean you couldn't pass them safely accross dll boundaries?

Yep, C++ exceptions have their share of problems (I even wrote an article on that subject: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/cppexceptionsproetcontra.aspx ), and as with many other C++ features if you don't learn how to use them properly better stay away from them.

The point of my post is that many people complain about minor (pointer syntax, etc) or non-existing (finally, lack of GC) problems with C++, while there are a plenty of real ones to bitch about: hard to parse (resulting in fewer and less perfect tools), takes long to compile, has many wrong defaults, etc, etc.

Anyway, this is all off topic - I don't think anybody seriously believes C++ is the next big JVM language :)

> Robert- maybe I missed it in my perusal, but the article
> you cite has zero information about MS deliberately
> bloating their SW to help Intel.
>
> Please support your claim.

That article describes the Wintel term.

Here's one on the symbiosis:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-10141326-60.html

" Intel built its business model around the need for constantly increasing performance."

A reasonable person would see that as "Windoze keeps sucking up more cycles".


Here's another:

http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/MEDIA/1998/wintel.html

"In order to use PCs, there was no alternative but OSes from Microsoft. Microsoft kept releasing slower software, forcing users to require faster CPUs. As long as Windows worked only on Intel processors, Intel had an interest in supporting Microsoft. As long as non-Microsoft OSes did not run on Intel CPUs, Microsoft had an interest in supporting Intel."


About 2 minutes of letting my fingers doing the searching. OTOH, I've been doing this since before there as an IBM/PC, so it's sitting a few centimeters above my lower brain stem.

> The point of my post is that many people complain about
> minor (pointer syntax, etc) or non-existing (finally, lack
> of GC) problems with C++, while there are a plenty of real
> ones to bitch about

Maybe it didn't come through in my original post, but the things I complained about were intended to be minor, "humorous newbie" nits, cause at the end I said something like "not to mention the real problems..."


Agree that C++ is not the next big JVM language!

> Robert- maybe I missed it in my perusal, but the article
> you cite has zero information about MS deliberately
> bloating their SW to help Intel.
>
> Please support your claim.

And here's some hard numbers (another minute or 2 of letting my fingers doing the searching, it's not that tough):

http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-intel-giveth-microsoft-taketh-away.html

"As I stated in the beginning, the conventional wisdom regarding PC evolution could be summed up in this way: “What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.” The testing I conducted here shows that the wisdom continues to hold true right up through the current generation of Windows Vista + Office 2007. What’s shocking, however, is the way that the IT community as a whole has grown to accept the status quo."

> http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-10141326-60.html
>
> " Intel built its business model around the need for
> constantly increasing performance."
>
> A reasonable person would see that as "Windoze keeps
> sucking up more cycles".

No. A reasonable person would see that as "apps keep doing more stuff like automatically recompiling on the fly, autoformatting your code, Flash videos instead of simple workable HTML text links, supercool semi-transparent color-gradient GUIs that popup Bing links instead of a rectangular black and white button, downloading from YouTube, tweet your facebook to your android, hmm, even autocompiling to a database schema".

These eat cycles.

The second article presents no data showing that Windows versions became slower, (which is probably true and easy to obtain) let alone data that Windows was deliberately made slower.

> " Intel built its business model around the need for
> constantly increasing performance."
>
> A reasonable person would see that as "Windoze keeps
> sucking up more cycles".

Actually, no, only an unreasonable person would make a logical connection between these two statements.

I should have seen this coming when I saw you spell Microsoft "M$" and Windows "Windoze".

> Here's another:
>
> http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/MEDIA/1998/wintel.html

A twelve year old link from a random blogger. Very convincing, indeed.

--
Cédric

> > http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-10141326-60.html
> >
> > " Intel built its business model around the need for
> > constantly increasing performance."
> >
> > A reasonable person would see that as "Windoze keeps
> > sucking up more cycles".
>
> No. A reasonable person would see that as "apps keep
> doing more stuff like automatically recompiling on the
> fly, autoformatting your code, Flash videos instead of
> simple workable HTML text links, supercool
> semi-transparent color-gradient GUIs that popup Bing links
> instead of a rectangular black and white button,
> downloading from YouTube, tweet your facebook to your
> android, hmm, even autocompiling to a database schema".
>
> These eat cycles.
>
> The second article presents no data showing that Windows
> versions became slower, (which is probably true and easy
> to obtain) let alone data that Windows was deliberately
> made slower.

Did you read this part?

The net result is that, surprise, Vista + Office 2007 + state of the art hardware delivers throughput that’s nearly on par (~22% slower) with the previous generation of Windows XP + Office 2003 + the previous state of the art hardware. In other words, the hardware gets faster, the code base gets fatter and the user experience, as measured in terms of application response times and overall execution throughput, remains relatively constant. The Great Moore’s Law Compensator is vindicated.

> http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-intel-giveth-microsoft-taketh-away.html

Thanks, this 3rd article has some stats on things getting slower. Good. (Though I couldn't get his interactive table to work)

I'm not sure what they did in Office 2007 to make it so slow. But, until them, for 7 years, things were either stable, or getting slower due to virus issues.

"the development team was being sidetracked by a string of security breaches in the Windows XP code base. The resulting fix, Windows XP Service Pack 2, was more of a re-launch than a mere update. Whole sections of the OS core were either replaced or rewritten, and new technologies – like Windows Defender and a revamped firewall – added layers of code to a rapidly bloating platform."


So, according to this, it wasn't MS who was plotting with Intel, arguably, it's the Virus and Anti-Virus writers who are. (And I find that fairly believable)


Office 2007 made the mess. They did add a lot of new file formats and used XML. And the super-cool GUI I mentioned before. My take-home message is that the continued rampant misuse of XML has ruined programming. I've seen it used to hold binary results data as text, expanding file sizes by more than 100X.


It's ironic that we are in a forum discussing future languages that run interpreted on a virtual machine, and likely will do away with primitives and raw arrays to be "pure OO", and discussing raw speed and code bloat.

> >
> http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-intel-giveth-micr
> osoft-taketh-away.html
>
> Thanks, this 3rd article has some stats on things getting
> slower. Good. (Though I couldn't get his interactive
> table to work)
>
> I'm not sure what they did in Office 2007 to make it so
> slow. But, until them, for 7 years, things were either
> stable, or getting slower due to virus issues.
>
> "the development team was being sidetracked by a string of
> security breaches in the Windows XP code base. The
> resulting fix, Windows XP Service Pack 2, was more of a
> re-launch than a mere update. Whole sections of the OS
> core were either replaced or rewritten, and new
> technologies – like Windows Defender and a revamped
> firewall – added layers of code to a rapidly bloating
> platform."
>
>
> So, according to this, it wasn't MS who was plotting with
> Intel, arguably, it's the Virus and Anti-Virus writers who
> are. (And I find that fairly believable)

Starting with Win95, M$ issued edicts that the new version couldn't be run on current machines; go buy a new one. Memory upgrades, when possible, might allow Win/Office to function, but run substantially slower than the previous versions. Computerworld's archive will have all the history one would need.

That Windoze *needs* anti-virus is *not* due to 95% monopoly (or whatever the %-age). That's a bit gas passed by M$ fanboys. The reason is that DOS (which M$ did not write, but stole), and Windoze following, was built to allow applications to fiddle the hardware. The first program to need that ability (and the program, killer app, which made M$ viable) was 1-2-3. DOS was a control program, not an operating system. It was largely a clone of CP/M for the 8086/8. That mindset was built into the foundation of all the M$ folks did, and remains. *nix in general, and linux in particular, is an operating system; applications don't get to fiddle the hardware. linux is parsimonious of memory and cycles. The M$ folk have been backfilling against viruses ever since. You can only patch so much. Vista was supposed to be the blank sheet of paper answer. We all know how well that worked out.

>
>
> Office 2007 made the mess. They did add a lot of new file
> formats and used XML. And the super-cool GUI I mentioned
> before. My take-home message is that the continued
> rampant misuse of XML has ruined programming. I've seen
> it used to hold binary results data as text, expanding
> file sizes by more than 100X.

They didn't use xml, another prevarication out of Redmond. They tried, and sort of got away with it, to subvert xml. I have no use for xml, either. What M$ did was take a simplistic syntax specification, and slip in proprietary binary bits which make their files unusable by any other program. As bad as xml is, having a clear-text (sharable) document is a laudable goal. Not that I would chose xml for that role.

>
>
> It's ironic that we are in a forum discussing future
> languages that run interpreted on a virtual machine, and
> likely will do away with primitives and raw arrays to be
> "pure OO", and discussing raw speed and code bloat.

Yeah, how did that happen? :)

> > " Intel built its business model around the need for
> > constantly increasing performance."
> >
> > A reasonable person would see that as "Windoze keeps
> > sucking up more cycles".
>
> Actually, no, only an unreasonable person would make a
> logical connection between these two statements.
>
> I should have seen this coming when I saw you spell
> Microsoft "M$" and Windows "Windoze".
>
> > Here's another:
> >
> > http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/MEDIA/1998/wintel.html
>
> A twelve year old link from a random blogger. Very
> convincing, indeed.
>
> --
> Cédric


Yes, the "M$" and the Windoze are the cues that you can't take anything that Robert says seriously.

He's a one trick pony that still hasn't waken up from his Slashdweeb coma circa 1999 or so.

>
> Yes, the "M$" and the Windoze are the cues that you can't
> take anything that Robert says seriously.
>
> He's a one trick pony that still hasn't waken up from his
> Slashdweeb coma circa 1999 or so.

I find it almost amusing. Facebook is getting most heat for being "evil" these days, and before Facebook there was Google. Microsoft is really a "day before yesterday" story - even EU is not after it any more. Just waiting to see some old timer who still hates IBM or DEC :)

But in all seriousness, I would really prefer to see Artima discussions keeping on topic and professional. It is probably not possible without some kind of moderation, though.

Is there an equivalent in the Linux distro world to requiring much better hardware to just run a similar GUI, to the wearying argument above?

I don't install new Linux systems very often but it seems to me that they have fairly slavishly followed the more shiny UI approach and similarly the hardware demand has increased.

That is surely an existence proof against an MS conspiracy?

Similarly, OS/X required drastically bigger machines to add its GUI advances. As a cross-platform developer of more than twenty years experience, I have some terrifyingly old Macs that start and run snappily, but the experience looks really flat!

> Is there an equivalent in the Linux distro world to
> requiring much better hardware to just run a similar GUI,
> to the wearying argument above?
>
> I don't install new Linux systems very often but it seems
> to me that they have fairly slavishly followed the more
> shiny UI approach and similarly the hardware demand
> has increased.
>
> That is surely an existence proof against an MS
> conspiracy?
>
> Similarly, OS/X required drastically bigger machines to
> add its GUI advances. As a cross-platform developer of
> more than twenty years experience, I have some
> terrifyingly old Macs that start and run snappily, but the
> experience looks really flat!

Not even remotely true. Yes, if you take the default Gnome or KDE they are a bit shiny. OTOH, I went from ubuntu 8.10 to 10.04, and the latest Gnome is snappier than the previous, on the same machine, of course. Moreover, if you don't like Gnome or KDE, any number of window managers are available, including fvwm, which has been around since the early 1990's and was what I used when I installed Slackware back then. Do the boys from Redmond offer such?