Multithreaded I/O in the DMD compiler (DDJ article by Walter)

[Bill Baxter]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> Daniel Keep wrote:
>>
>> Warning: semi-rant ahead.  Feel free to ignore.  :)
>
> [...]
>>
>> Windows is a pain in the arse, and there isn't a day that goes by where
>> I don't wish I could get rid of it from my life.  But the fact is that
>> it's STILL better than Linux.
>>
>> Andrei said that Windows is for users, and unix is for programmers.
>> That's fine; I'm a programmer!  But I'm also a user.  I shouldn't have
>> to spend all day to work out how to do something in linux that's trivial
>> in Windows.
>
> What you don't realize is that you spend all day to work out how to do
> something in Windows that's trivial in Unix. And that "something" is writing
> computer programs. I agree that winamp, games, ..., are much more polished
> in Windows. I mean, it's a foregone conclusion. It's the core market of
> Windows!
>
> Now here's the thing: mono-culturalism is worse than either Windows or Unix
> bigotry. If you know the OS, go ahead, rant all you want about it. But I
> have little consideration for rants against some OS from people who don't
> know it.
>
> And the situation isn't symmetric, which is liable to raise an eyebrow. I
> only know two persons who know Unix and prefer Windows. One worked for
> Microsoft, the other loves every big American company and is in fact a
> Microsoft fan (nothing wrong with that). All others I know disliking Unix
> actually don't know it. On the other hand, I know plenty of programmers who
> know both Unix and Windows programming and can't bring themselves to think
> seriously about getting work done in Windows. I also know Unix zealots who
> have no idea about Windows, and their rants are pretty damaging (Richard
> Stallman only tried to use Word once and was unable to do anything with it -
> too many confusing menus and buttons... a sad case of monoculture.) Finally,
> programmers who only know Windows kind of just don't know better so they
> take it as a given without becoming fans and that's that.

I think your "for users" vs "for programmers" distinction is quite
apt.  Overall I would prefer to program under Unix (although I'd still
like to keep the Visual Studio debugger :-P), but to do user things
under Windows.  Problem is those user-things sort of happen
intermittently throughout the day, and in the end I find that with
Cygwin, emacs, etc. the programming environment under Windows is more
tolerable to me than the user environment under Linux.  So I'm happier
overall under Windows.  I do keep a VMware Ubuntu handy, though, and
fire it up once a week or so.   Usually to play around with some 3rd
party code that hasn't been ported to Windows, or use some tool that I
couldn't get to work easily under cygwin.

As for pathetic little cmd.com, Microsoft seems to be trying to do
something new in the shell area with the PowerShell.  I tried it out a
bit, but it's quite a change from a typical command line shell.  Not
sure how long it would take to get the hang of it.  The impression I
get is that the main point of it is to give you a way to control
everything about Windows using scripts, which is good.  Kind of
reminiscent of AppleScript in that sense.  I think it also has a
not-so-brain-dead programming language for scripting.  The fact that
they are at least attempting to do something to improve the shell
under Windows is promising, at least.

--bb