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Seeking Multi-Platform I/O Libraries?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm just getting ready to plunge into a new project, and joy of joys have been given complete freedom when it comes to the implementation language - so long as the program will build and run on both x86 Linux and Windows. Now, I don't need a GUI, this is systems stuff only (processing binary executables in fact, so lots of bitfiddling and big nasty algorithms over hairy data structures) so pretty much all I need are standard IO libraries. C is currently at the top of my list..but what other language should I be looking at? I'm happy to learn a new one, and have the go ahead to do it..like I say, they want absolute speed. Can someone suggest a better language? C++ is out, it does come with a speed hit (using C++ properly anyway, not as a
souped-up C). If I'm gonna take the speed hit, I
may as well consider something like Ocaml which might let me claw the speed back with better algorithms and data structures.."
I know it's a bit of a stretch, but consider Python. Prototype the heck out of the system in Python, profile the application, then recode the bottlenecks in C. Use SWIG to generate your interfaces. Easier to program, easier to extend, easier to read/maintain. Shorter programming time, too.
You'll be happier, your fellow programmers will be happier, your successor programmers will be happier, and the chewy parts of your code will still be really fast. Think about it.
Yes and no. Python is a nice language, and potentially useful. However, where I work we have a "legacy" system written in python with SWIG (interacting with C++).
/. and would be very unhappy with me discussing this.]
The problem is that under large workloads (which is normal for us) you end up with python spending more time marshalling and unmarshalling objects. It's a PITA. I blame this mostly on SWIG (which I am NOT a fan of. Don't get me started on what the maintainers consider good development practice.)
Python's a great choice if you can do it all natively. It's also a great language to prototype in and then "translate" to another language like C++ or C or Java. (depending on task and preference.) But I wouldn't do the python+swig thing.
[Note: I'm only posting anonymously to protect my identity. There are certain political factions at work that read
Have you actually tried using Python? If you have, it's probably for not enough time or using the wrong tools
1. Using indentation instead of braces kills the religious "coding convention" wars before they have a chance to start. It's easy to read, it makes what you read and what the parser read consistent (Never chased a mismatched indentation/braces case, have you?), and it just plain works. Where did that function start? Any editor worth its while can tell you that, most of them already have a macro that does this. If you ever used Scintilla/SciTE you'd probably never go back to "find matching" only style editors unless you were forced to - collapsing functions makes a lot of sense even in the curly brace world (more so in Python's indentation world).
2. There are add-ons that can enforce that, but that would be missing the point. The Python interpreter and language specification goes to some length to catch this kind of errors, and although it's a long way from e.g. C or Java, it caters for the common cases. Typos in long variable names may create annoying bugs, but ones that are _always_ easy to identify and fix. True, they wait for run time rather than compile time; personally, the number of bugs of this kind that I get is consistently low enough for this not to matter (and, since Python code tends to be an order of magnitude shorter than any other language except Lisp or APL, it's more than worth it. Plus, there's a Lint for Python if you insist). Variable declarations are NOT free documentation. "Object my_object = new Blah();" is not more informative than "my_object = Blah()". It's the variable's name that's the documentation, rarely it's type.
3. Oh jesus. C++, Java, SmallTalk, LISP and just about any other language does this too. What language are you using? Plus, try scintilla and you'll be amazed at what a GOOD language sensitive editor can do (for any of the above languages).
You may want to try AT&T's sfio, coauthored by David Korn of the shell by the same name fame.