Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 7th Jul 2007 19:09 UTC, submitted by flanque
"Two years ago, the number of developers writing applications for the Microsoft Windows platform fell, while the opposite was true for Linux - this has now become a trend. Instead of the Web stealing away Windows Users, as people have predicted for years, it's Linux and handheld devices. According to analysts at the Evans Data Corporation research house, 64.8 percent of North American developers are writing software for Windows, down from 74 percent only a year ago. The decline in popularity of the world's most prevalent operating systems appears to coincide with the rise of Linux, as the number of developers targeting the open-source environment has gone up by three percentage points from 8.8 percent to 11.8 percent in the same year."
Thread beginning with comment 253782
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-24
"""
Well, for the desktop, you are right.
On the server, you aren't.
"""
No. On a server the app is typically going to be something developed in-house. So the company is paying for the expensive development time all by themselves, and will be paying to maintain it, and will be responsible for any errors.
It is especially important, in that case, for the code to be clear and maintainable above all else.
And $2.50 * 1000 instances is *still* only $2500, which is going to be a fraction of the cost of the server, and *totally* dwarfed by the cost of the developers' time... and ongoing maintenance.
Also, on a Unix-like server OS, anyway, quite a bit of that 40MB is going to be shared. And anything that is truly in memory unnecessarily is going to end up off in swap anyway if the OS has a decent VM.
So I would say that my viewpoint holds *especially* true in server environments.
Coding to save memory, for its own sake, is *highly* overrated, and the fact that people still consider doing so a badge of honor is mainly a commentary on just how rapidly things have changed in the last 20 years.
In today's world, it makes much more sense to focus on designing systems to *scale out*, where feasible, and not on clever ways to save memory.
From a business perspective, memory is cheap, processor is cheap, and disk is cheap.
People... are expensive. Coding mistakes... are expensive.
Edited 2007-07-08 02:09