Slashdot Mirror
Competitive Cross-Platform Development?
Avalonia asks: "I work for a software company in the oil and gas exploration industry with a software development team of seven. Our software and development environment is cross-platform on Solaris, Irix, Linux and Windows. Most of our customers are on Solaris and Irix 64-bit systems, but Linux and Windows are increasingly important. Our environment is based around an elaborate command-line system of Makefiles controlling four different compilers (gcc 3.1, Sun Forte, Irix MIPSpro and Visual C++ 7). Needless to say, maintaining this system and producing modern multi-threaded C++ that will go through the four build systems is time-consuming in the extreme. A large proportion of our time is spent finding C++ code that just works rather than being creative and competitive with new functionality. What tools and strategies can we use to increase our productivity and regain our competitive advantage, without going for Windows only?"
"Our recent single-platform competitors (Windows only) can seriously outrun us in terms of productivity by using a single modern IDE development environment - such as C++ builder or Visual Studio - although we can scale onto larger multiprocessor Unix systems. With Windows 64-bit imminent we may lose our 'big-iron' scalability advantage. Java is not currently an option for the high-performance numerical and immersive graphical aspect of our applications."
In defense of my previous post:
As for graphics, there is a QT binding for perl that will allow you to do cross platform GUI work (and it looks nice, too)
As for speed, making C/C++ plugins for perl is not hard, and if you can break out your high-speed numerical pieces into small bits of code, it's relatively easy to call them from perl.
That said, perl isn't that slow. After you break out a few critical routines into their own XSUB modules, I bet you'd be surprised how fast perl is.
Also, perl 5.8 has very good threading support, and it isn't a global mutex around the interpreter like it is with some other interpreted languages.
Have you looked at Qt? It supports all the platforms you are developing for. It is primarily a platform independent GUI toolkit, but it also got a lot of other stuff like container classes (if you for some reason won't use stl), thread support, sql classes, xml classes and socket classes, all which are platform independent. It is not only just a portable GUI toolkit, I think it is the best GUI toolkit there is. I recommend it even if you're writing for Windows only. If you think of Qt more as a platform than a GUI toolkit, writing applications that run on multiple platforms (with native speed) may be easier than you think. (I'm not an employee of trolltech, although I am wearing a Qt t-shirt as I write this :)