[rescue] Solaris on a PPC

[Dave McGuire]

On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 06:11 AM, Frank Van Damme wrote:
>>    For proof, compare the sit-down-and-use-it performance of ANY other
>> modern desktop platform (I said "modern", i.e. not Windows) with Gnome
>> or KDE.  I'm not even talking about minimalist stuff like X with
>> twm...Try, for example, X with CDE.
>
> I sadly have to agree. Kde is pretty much going the same way as 
> windows, it
> takes up almost half the RAM that Xp does *g* . OTOH, I thought CDE 
> fell
> under the "old crap" category? Or do I have to jump in a manhole again 
> now?

   Well, since it's a current product, in current development, I would 
have to say it isn't "old crap".  Sure, it's been around awhile...but 
by that metric, the x86 architecture is 25 years old and UNIX is well 
over 30.

> Personally, I use Enlightenment, and on top of that I run gnome or kde
> applications.

   I used Enlightenment for a while, when my main desktop machine was an 
SGI.  It was ok save for a few stability issues, and it was a bit slow. 
  I was disappointed when they seemed to stop development...have they 
picked up again?

> I am not a developer, but afaik c++ compilations take a LOT more 
> temporary
> disk space then C.

   In terms of swap space, you mean?

   C++ is an object-oriented language (well, mostly) and C is a 
procedural language...Today's computer processors are procedural 
devices by their very design.  Mapping the constructs of an 
object-oriented language onto procedural hardware is going to involve 
some inefficiencies.  Though I'd like to, I haven't studied this 
extensively from a theoretical standpoint...but it stands to reason 
that many of the performance problems that we commonly see in 
applications written in C++ may owe themselves to this.

   Now, a good friend of mine...a guy named Geoff, one of the most 
talented and technically sharp programmers I've ever known...insists 
that C++ code can be written to be as fast and efficient as any C code 
(and he knows both VERY well)...and he further says that all the C++ 
stuff that I have performance complaints about is bad because it's 
poorly written, plain & simple...not because it was written in C++.

   Gnome, on the other hand, is all (or nearly all) C...not C++...or so 
I was told.

>>    There is no reason...ZERO...for this stuff to be this bloated.  It
>> has some great functionality, sure, but nowhere near enough to justify
>> hundreds of megabytes of disk space and a day-long compile.
>
> All that code must go SOMEWHERE though. What does it do then?

   Fluff.  I haven't looked at it specifically, but I'm guessing most of 
it is simply fluff.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "I've grown hair again, just
St. Petersburg, FL           for the occasion."       -Doc Shipley