Synergistically bringing together multiple topics, this week's show synergizes Palm's new Pixi, the Palm "App Catalog" and the AppStore, Microsoft's anti-Linux training, Sega's Dreamcast, Apple's Grand Central Dispatch and finally Chrome's extensions. Feel the synergy!
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Member since:2006-01-04
Member since:2005-11-10
GCC does its thing fine, but it has problems that cannot be easily solved, not least of which is RMS. Clang / LLVM are not complete yet, they are not a drop-in replacement for GCC just-yet, and work is ongoing.
Apple tried to work with GCC and it was going nowhere. It’s not that GCC is bad, but rather that improving it is difficult and ultimately Apple were forced to create a new project from scratch to solve their complaints.
That is what is bad about GCC, not what comes out of the compiler (that's fine), but the various management and design issues.
Member since:2006-01-03
Member since:2007-07-20
Kroc, you say that RMS is the problem with GCC, where did you get this idea???.
What emails on what mailing lists show him arguing with apple devs or blocking apple development somehow.
RMS hardly develops software, other people work on emacs, gcc (and other tools he wrote).
He writes emails and is really more of an activist these days from what I can tell.
Edited 2009-09-14 19:55 UTC
Member since:
2007-07-20
Hi, some comments on the show.
, its not like Im installing new apps on a daily basis.
* thought Korc and Thom overlooked the windows news item, that it was targeted at sales people rather then just advertising to consumers. To me this is the big difference because they are trying to get sales people not to recommend linux rather then change the consumers perception by advertising to them directly.
* Kroc, why are you so sure that GCC is bad, I have tested CLang for raytracing and generally found GCC to be slightly faster, clang also shows visual artifacts probably some floating point math error.
I also looked up info on this and apparently the code generated by GCC is not inferior to CLang. Even tho CLang is more flexible.
The advantage apple has with CLang is they can integrate it into XCode while keeping XCode closed source since its BSD.
As well as take advantage of LLVM to run code on a GPU, though not sure that this is taken full advantage of at the moment.
* Regarding Grand Central Dispatch, If your talking about making a for loop threaded, Im surprised nobody mentioned OpenMP (which GCC supports).
* Agree with Thom that all software installation sucks (on every OS), Kroc, you mention how bad the linux model is and I agree with you too (shell scripts with binary data).
On the other hand its not something that worries me too much since 99% of the time the package manager is fine, even though linux software installation its not "User Friendly", I have flashbacks of editing windows-xp registry, having apps add themselves into the system in very hard to remove ways etc. So I don't really care if I have to make the desktop Icon myself that much
* Regarding updates with package managers being too slow, I use Arch linux and amazingly it doesn't break for me, Id like to see more distro's move to rolling release cycles.
Perhaps Ubuntu could have an option where a select set of user apps (eg. firefox, gimp, openoffice etc), have immediate updates, but lower level stuff like X and the kernel only get the regular fixes.
Edited 2009-09-14 14:51 UTC