On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Ross Walker <rswwalker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> You can't be very agile working in C, though. Something called C with
>> roughly similar syntax may work on a lot of platforms but that doesn't
>> mean that you can actually compile and run the same code. Where with
>> java you don't even have to recompile. Look at how jenkins is able
>> to run in master/slave mode with slaves running on an assortment of
>> platforms at once. What would you have to do to match something
>> like jasper reports or the pentaho tools ability to connect to
>> databases and do page layouts in C in a way that would work on such a
>> wide assortment of systems?
>
> Of course C isn't very flexible by itself and often needs a library (or OS) to make it truly useful.
More to the point, the OS libraries have little in common. If you
don't write on top of a compatibility library (cygwin/APR/wxWidgets,
etc.) you have to rewrite everything to move to a different OS. And
that defeats most of the other reasons you'd write in C (efficiency,
control, etc.). Look at something as useful as rsync and after all
these years there's still no native windows port.
> Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying everything should be written in C.
>
> What I was trying to say is that as a language C is both cross-plaform and open and it's the "openness" that prevents "lock in" as much as it being cross-platform.
In most cases you need to look at the bottom line of
hardware/os/software licensing/programmer time all at the same time
where the dollars are all the same color. It may take months/years of
programmer time and extra compiler licenses to make something in C run
across platforms. That's not quite the same thing as just copying jar
files around.
> Now if Oracle would fully open Java, then I would add that to my list of cross-platform languages, but until then it's a language I feel would "lock me in".
You can never count on free future support or additions to anything
and java isn't an exception, but how can anything that works now on
current openjdk (which includes most open source java apps and
libraries) be locked in?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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