[rescue] Solaris on a PPC

[Frank Van Damme]

On Thursday 06 February 2003 20:27, Dave McGuire wrote:

> > 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.

Current development? I learn somehing new every day... 

> > 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?

Actually this is a mistake many people make. 
The old enlightenment 0.16 as we know it (the window manager that eats 5 
megs ram and that supports transparant window moving) isn't developped 
anymore. They're working on something "better" however, a new window 
manager/ file manager etc. based on a canvas that can be hardware 
accelerated. I'd check out 
http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/components.html - I compile the whole 
thing every now and then to see how far they are. Try out the Evas demo! :)

> > 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?

In terms of du -hs after the build.

>    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++.

He knows a lot better then I do for sure. You often see holy wars about 
which is the ultimate programming language but I have yet to see a 
scientific study showing which of both sides is right. 

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

that's right, it's in C. 

-- 
Frank Van Damme
http://www.openstandaarden.be