Re: What about Embedded?

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Fri, 2006-07-21 at 00:03 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 23:24 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:


> D *easily* beats mono and java in every benchmark so runtime 
> optimisations count for very little here.
> 
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=all〈=dlang&lang2=csharp

Most of the tests I see on that page are specific algorithms that
utilise already manually optimized techniques.

The reality, however, is that most desktop application softwares don't
look *at all* like these tests. Most desktop application softwares are
very unoptimized pieces of code that do *a lot* disk I/O, inter process
communication, write a lot things to the X server (also IPC) and perform
an unholy amount of string (and other types of memory) copying (and an
almost equal amount of not-freeing that).

Real code is very often not at all like these school algorithms that
have been developed by keen students. They are used, yes. But those
parts of the application-code indeed runs often optimized already.

> I believe Mono was rejected mostly by Sun Developers with concerns over 
> bloat and memory usage being high on the list (and maybe a few political 
> reasons).

I wouldn't say Sun has something to do with this. Let's not accuse
people here, shall we?

> D does not have these issues and if a few of us Gnome developers start 
> using it we may find we can get in Gnome one day :)

Just use it. Why do you want it *in* GNOME so fast? 

> Why do we need reflection?

I'm not saying your *need* it. I'm saying a lot developers are *using*
it. I usually avoid using it myself.

> If and when Gobject gets full introspection it will become irrelevant.

Ugh .. GObject introspection will not at all have all the features
reflection in Java and .NET have. Not even close.

> Reflection does affect performance too which is why D avoided it and 
> stuck to introspectable properties only. D has made sensible design 
> choices by following Delphi's design instead of java/c#.

I agree with that. 

> We already have most of what we need in Gnome already for building cool 
> desktop apps - we just need D bindings for the Gnome specific stuff.

So help the guys doing just that?


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be