re-writing college books [was: Re: A banner year for software bugs | Tech News on ZDNet]

[michaelslists at gmail.com (mikeiscool)]

On 10/28/06, David Crocker <dcrocker at eschertech.com> wrote:
> Crispin Cowan wrote:
>
> > >
> For me, the enemy in the room is C++. It gives you the safety of C with the
> performance of SmallTalk. There is no excuse at all to be writing anything in
> C++ yet vastly too many applications are written in C++ anyway. Instead of
> trying to coax developers to switch from C++ to something "weird" like SML, lets
> encourage them to switch to Java or C#, which are closer to their experience.
> <<
>
> Unfortunately, there are at least two situations in which C++ is a more suitable
> alternative to Java and C#:
>
> - Where performance is critical. Run time of C# code (using the faster .NET 2.0
> runtime) can be as much as double the run time of a C++ version of the same
> algorithm. Try telling a large company that it must double the size of its
> compute farms so you can switch to a "better" programming language!

Don't go there, sister. Come up with some reasonable tests before
making a statement like that. "Assembly code can be as much as a
million times faster then the run time of a C++ version of the same
algorithm." Bit useless, isn't it?

Lets not forget that writing faster/more optimised code in c++ will be
more complex and hence allow room for more errors then letting the
c#/java runtime optimiser do the dirty work for us.


> However, I suspect that most security-critical programs do not fall into either
> of these categories,

What? Cryptography rings a bell ...


> so C# or Java would indeed be a better choice than C++ for
> those programs.
>
> David Crocker, Escher Technologies Ltd.
> Consultancy, contracting and tools for dependable software development
> www.eschertech.com

-- mic