Quotes of the week

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 13, 2007 4:19 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (guest, #15888)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by JoeBuck
Parent article: Quotes of the week

KDE is an application (okay, it's a bit more than that, but...), Linus was talking about system level code (okay, he was actually talking about Git, but...)

Having worked on massive graphically-intensive and interactive apps (in particular, GIS systems) in both C and C++ (I was an early adopter; I still have nightmares about some of the code that cfront generated <g>), I'll take the latter for the application framework any day.

Most of the bottlenecks in such systems hinge on algorithm design rather than finely tuned optimization anyway; if you're retrieving 10,000 features from a database and then rendering them according to some parametric symbology definition, you need to focus on getting rid of some of those inner loops altogether rather than just making them faster. (And also splitting the task into multiple threads so that eg the graphics can be rendering while waiting on the next records from the DB, etc)

Desktop app code is just different from OS and backend utility code, the use cases are different, the priorities are different (eg user-perceived response time vs actual resource usage). Of course, as has been said before, one can write crappy code in any language.

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