[ale] Ruby vs C, a non-technical chat

[Phil Turmel]

On 08/06/2015 03:15 PM, Michael Trausch wrote:
> Indeed. It was windows and a lack of glib/gobject being tiny and
> rapidly usable that convinced me to look closely at C++ to assist
> with the complexity. I like gobject but all the free desktop stuff
> doesn't apply on windows and its several weeks of work to replace it
> with fully functional shell API integration that makes people happy.
> 
> I dropped glib; I now use the C++ object system, and export those to
> C when needed through trampolines. Implementing a new
> platform-specific class is relatively easy by just using a $PLATFORM
> subdirectory in src/ and telling the build system to compile those.
> Generic code is in src/.
> 
> I have a base framework that I created which eliminates differences
> in event loops, port I/O, network I/O, and GUI rendering/API access.
> My same API works on Linux framebuffer, X11, and Windows. Adding
> Cocoa to that as soon as I can, then I can add next step, gnu step,
> and os x to the list of supported environments. I would like to make
> one more component, to hide winsock2 behind a real BSD sockets
> interface so that I can easily use third party libraries without
> worrying if they've been ported to winsock. But I am currently doing
> just fine without it since a lot of libraries let you decouple them
> from the network without an issue, using in-memory buffers as the
> temporary placeholder.
> 
> Perhaps the biggest benefit of all, though, is the syntactic sugar
> you get for making objects behave as primitive scalar or array
> values. Operator overloading, judiciously used, saves me a lot of
> time and helps me to reduce duplication and typing, without
> sacrificing ease of reading or adding tons of runtime bloat. The fact
> that one can choose to make it an inline or a true method call is
> nice, too.
> 
> Well, that and the fact that I can do cross platform development
> without thinking about platform quirks anymore. Holy crap that is
> nice. I don't have to worry if I am poll()ing file descriptors or
> using MsgWaitForMultipleObjects() on a set of HANDLEs: I just have an
> EventSource and EventLoop class which handles all that for me.
> 
> POSIX AIO vs NT overlapped I/O? Ain't gotta worry about that, either.
> Or threads. Or services. I do hate the way a daemon is overly
> complicated on windows but one little class and I can compile a
> daemon to behave as it should under sysvinit, systemd, or windows.
> 
> And don't get me started on serial ports! Why Microsoft took
> inspiration from VMS and not POSIX is beyond me.

Ok.  I want.  How much can you show?

Phil