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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."
www.eclipse.org
I think it runs on several of the environments you mention. And I think there are C++ plugins for it.
BC
why all the different compilers?
.. but can't gcc cross compile? At least then you could dump alot of the compiler-specific scripting in your build procedures.
Hrm, this seems too simple an answer, there must be something wrong with it
"Old man yells at systemd"
Why not just use gcc for all four platforms? The sticking point would likely be Windows, but even if you elect to stay with MFC++ for Windows, you've reduced the incompatibilities from four to two different compilers.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You can, with some loss of performance, use GCC on all of those platforms. That would cut out compiler quirks as a variable.
Don't write Makefiles yourself. Instead write a script that translates simple build rules (foo.cpp -> foo.o -> foo.exe) into a custom Makefile for each platform. I went this route after battling for years with complex Makefile rules that never quite worked.
Are you kidding me? They are building a real application that performs and does multi-threaded as only C++ can do. If you can't use java, what makes you think that perl, especially interpretted, would do the trick? Yeah, fine for prototyping, but how is this going to help?
...begins in wonder
Python? :)
;)
Platform independent, it's highly creative, and damn if you can't prototype stuff quickly.
P.S. And you can actually understand the code months after you wrote it.
gcc is cross-platform, can cross-compile to different platforms, and for those who feel the need to use Windows, gcc has been ported, to the ever-popular development suite called DJGPP.
GCC
DJGPP
You are great player! Present you with points!
LOL! Well, you didn't suggest Javascript, so I guess that counts for something.
"Old man yells at systemd"
This would seem like a good solution on the surface of it but the 'immersive graphical aspect of our applications' that was mentioned may mean Perl is out of the question.
Of course I've never done any graphical programming in Perl (besides Perl/CGI) so I could be wrong depending on the nature of the GUI.
As with the sun's light
My mom was magnificent
Unquestionable
...uhm...ahmmm...mmm. Dunno what to add.
I assume that most of your problems are in the GUI end of the equation - why not break the application into two bits? Put the numerical stuff on a grunty 8 way box, and cook up the UI with whatever language best suits the available (and hireable) skills and platform?
Communication between the two is probably best through SOAP, although to be honest I've not looked into this area for a long time. The GUI can still be built from Java (I believe Java has some reasonably fast OpenGL wrappers now), or look into wxWindows using the existing C++ resource.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I've done something similar in a mixed environemnt. The way we set it up is to use java for GUI and logic development and then run a profiler against it and go native on those functions that needed it. These functions would be compiled into a library. (You'd be amazed how little of your code you need to optimize for huge performance gains!)
If I had to do it again I would do the same thing except I would use python as the 'main, relatively slow, easy to code and maintain' language.
Hajo
Hajo Monogamy: Belief so strong that millions of people end perfectly good relationships in order to start a new one.
If you have to use C++, then wxWindows is a great environment: it works on lots of platforms and has extensive support for platform-independent I/O, threading, and networking.
http://www.wxwindows.org/ - mature crossplatform C++ library, and not only for GUI, either.
I don't know what you need, but WxWindows and GCC cross-compiling (see mingw32 faq, for instance) might be what you need?
WxWindows also have good bindings to python and perl etc. for more rapid crossplatform development.
Read this.
All Windows productivity oxymoron jokes aside, how do you go from most of your users being on Solaris and Irix to thinking about going Windows only?
Erg...I just saw the second part of the article, after the ad. That was annoying. Maybe it's time to sign up for a subscription.
I think the parent is a joke, but:
if all you have is a hammer, eventually everything begins to look like a nail.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
Why not do what a great many other people do (though I have a feeling that you may be doing this already), and target a specific platform for initial release, and then release on the others afterward? This allows you to focus on the platform that gives you the most bang for the buck, but still keep your scaling advantage. If you already have an established product/development environment, then you should already know enough to keep from doing any of the "big mistakes" when it comes to writing portable code. Plus this allows you to divvie up your engineers into functionality vs porting.
Another thing would be to standardize on say, gcc. since the source is available, you can do whatever tweaks you need to to get around any performance issues (I know, easier said than done). Then standardize on things like configure.
I would suggest first using gcc on all UN*X platforms, and also trying out something like ant instead of the various forms of make you're dealing with now.
Also, have you considered using a library like Qt to handle most of the porting details? It's not free, but it is good if you can deal with it's oddities (I personally consider preprocessing to be evil).
Good luck.
-30-
gcc is built for portability, not speed. VC++'s code is faster, but has zero portability and its own magical, lsd-inspired "innovations." [" for(int i=0;in;i++); for(int i=0;in;i++); ? Why would anybody ever want to compile code like that?"] That intel compiler mentioned on /. a while back sounded fast; but the gcc-for-everything approach may not be best, if they find compiled java too slow.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
this topic (if you haven't read it already). The basic idea is to break out all parts that don't work across the different platforms into their own sections of code (classes/interfaces) assuming you aren't doing that already. Then when you do updates (that will hopefully work platform independantly) you can just right those sections once. Pretty obvious but I have seen so many places with this same issue who actually have completely seperate code bases rather then breaking parts out.
.NET CLR's for all those platforms.
Unfortunately if you are already doing this then you are probably screwed unless someone releases
controlling four different compilers (gcc 3.1, Sun Forte, Irix MIPSpro and Visual C++ 7)
Couldn't you just use gcc across all systems? There are also plenty of opensource IDEs around. We use
Eclipse along with ClearCase. Very good for cross platform.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
Ant is an excellent alternative to Makefiles. It might not solve all your problems, but you should at least be able to simplify your build process quite a bit.
Apache Ant
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
Instead of different makefiles for each compiler, why not write wrappers for the various compilers to give them all the same interface? Then at least for compiler invocation you could have the same makefile for all four platforms, just set CC=cc_wrapper which is a shell script (or .cmd script on Windows, or Perl or whatever) which mangles its command-line options into whatever weird syntax this platform's compiler expects.
With more fundamental issues like differences in the code accepted by different compilers, you can use #ifdefs in the code, which is not elegant but probably much better than makefile hacking.
Some suggested switching to gcc on all platforms, but then others said it might produce slower code. Well, you won't know until you benchmark. It's possible (just) that you might decide to compile most of your object files with gcc, to eliminate most of the compiler-specific hackery, and just compile those parts of the program that are speed-critical using the native compiler. This assumes that the object formats used by gcc and the native compiler are compatible, but in principle there's no reason they shouldn't be. (Perhaps not in practice, but give it a try.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Check out the latest edition of OilIT. Applications like this are why Fortran is still a very popular language among those who use computers for numerically-intensive work. Fortran9x is so easily portable, its not even funny. Bindings exist for all of the major threading standards (OMP, MPI, etc) and it is FAST. Further, is there any language with a better selection of libraries available for number-crunching? I doubt it. Develop your 'work' code in Fortran, and your front-end in Java. Both highly portable. The interface between the two will be platform specific, but this will only be a small portion of the total project & much easier to maintain than the large #ifdef heavy project you now have. $0.02
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.
Just add more people to your team! Double! Tripple! GO WILD WITH NEW RECRUITS!
Sheeesh, some people never learn...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
And I assume that you walked to work, have a hamster run generator that's powering the computer that you posted on, don't use anything plastic or wear nylons or spandex?
Why not isolate threads and files, and IPC into light-weight objects?
Sure you are going to have incompatible concepts across platforms (e.g. Windows doesn't support just unlinking an inode), but I'm sure you can find a happy subset without making too much compromise.
I know Alias|Wavefront uses a very similar concept for their Studio and Maya products. (studio looks and behaves identically on all platforms - so it *is* possible).
...why you think you can't use Java.For all the bad press Java gets about being "slow", it is mostly old, outdated FUD. Newer virtual machines are often faster than C/C++ applications, especially in the number crunching arena. Intensive graphics are no big issue since Java now has a fullscreen API (page flipping, double buffering, and all that), a very fast implementation of Java3D, and (if you prefer) OpenGL wrappers.
Even if you feel that Java doesn't cut it for everything, apply the 80/20 rule. 80% of your non-performance critical code in Java, and the later 10& in C/C++. This solution would at least *reduce* your multi-platform woes. You might try posting this on JavaGaming. The guys over there are wizards at making Java perform with intensive graphics. (No surprise considering that some of the industries greatest performance experts hang out there.) They can also help you find the APIs you need. I'd really take a second look before you toss Java out as an option.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Java isn't an all or nothing deal. You could write your app in Java and then convert the parts that really need performance into C and call it via JNI. Then you only have to deal with keeping a much smaller C library portable.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I've developed several multi-threaded mulit-plateformed applications using ACE. This is a very well thought out package using various patterns to abstract the vulgarities of the different OS / compilers. ADAPTIVE Communication Environment
Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred.
Just rewrite all your makefiles for gmake - which is cross platform and can use any compiler and use one of these libraries (ACE or Rogue Wave) along witg STL - and you are set.
I've done this... it works...
The GOF book gives an example of using the Bridge pattern to provide a platform-independent interface to a GUI api.
Disclaimer: I don't have any real-world experience with the Bridge pattern, so I can't say how easy it is to make work, or how it performs in performance critical situations.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
I've seen a few shows on TV recently that featured some really wicked looking oil and gas exploration software. Stuff that let geologists view layers of terrain collected by seismic data in 3d, moving around in realtime... If that's the kind of stuff you're into, I can understand why java isn't an option for display right now.
However, java is exactly what you need. You can scale it across processors on the big iron or run it on the desktop without recompiling.
Have you considered only writing your display logic in C++ and using java for the backend number crunching? For raw floating point math, I've read that java is barely slower than native code at this point. It's my understanding that talking to the OS so you can get to the hardware is where you take the major performance hits using java. If you could do your raw crunching in multi-threaded java code, you could then deliver the data through one of many different mechanisms to your display logic and have that be the only code that you need to port from OS to OS...
Another thing you could possibly look at is licensing 3rd party libraries made for cross-platform development. From your post, the only thing I know you're definitely having trouble porting is thread-related code. I'm sure there are multi-platform threading libraries for C++ out there somewhere.
So can we also assume you won't help hunting the deer that have completely overwhelmed the upper midwest due to 'conservation'?
http://datcp.state.wi.us/ah/agriculture/animals/di sease/chronic/faqs.html
Hmm Under "Symptoms", one is said to be "depression". How many of our tax dollars went towards analysis of deer psychology?
Damn bleeding heart liberals.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
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 :)
Obviously, you would leave the numeric and "immersive graphics" in C++, and link the python code to it....
:)
Leaving you to do interesting stuff _with_ the C++ components, but without having to formulate everything in C++.
Just preempting the "you did not read the post"-posts
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
I've had some experience doing just that. To date, Qt is the most mature of those and will give you uniform access to GUI, networking, threading and even database access for Win32, Unices (including Linux) and MacOS.
If you aren't so worried about GUIs but need to output multimedia contents portably, SDL is a viable alternative. The portability of some of the more esoteric components is dubious but SDL has the distinct advantage of being completely free.
As for performance concerns some people have raised about archaic versions of GCC, don't let that stop you-- even if you don't use GCC 3.2 (which produces very good code) the subtle improvement is speed is very rarely worth the greatly increased complexity in development and maintenance.
Besides, with recent GCCs I'm hard-pressed to actually find any significant difference between code generated by it and other compilers (for IA32, anyways, and with all relevant optimizations turned on).
-- MG
I've heard good things about QT. How good are its non-GUI classes? i.e. for numerics and more importantly for threads? We're looking at doing some crossplatform stuff and QT's support of the Mac is a major selling point.
- First, Qt (www.trolltech.com) is awesome. High performance, excellent portability (including all the UNIX platforms you mentioned, plus Linux/Windows/MacOS X), legacy integration (with Motif, etc.), multithreading, etc. There are also third party toolkits to integrate more advanced visualization into Qt (http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce.html?Ac tion=Show&AID=108).
Nowadays, Qt doesn't just handle GUIs. It also includes networking and threading abstractions, with really nice object oriented interfaces to them.
- Second, think about what IDE features you're looking for. If it's a GUI builder (which seems doubtful, considering that you probably spend a lot more time writing visualization algorithms than dialog boxes), then you could use Qt Designer.
But, if you're more generally interested in project management, integrated debugging, and source browsing, I'd suggest you take a look at Visual SlickEdit (http://www.slickedit.com), which integrates all those features into an amazing, cross-platform IDE/editor.
Good luck!
--JRZ
It's amazing how many things you find this way. It actually a good way to find many bugs as well. Since we've been doing this a while we also decided to avoid a lot of the "newer" C++ features and that really helped both speed and portability. (Since not all compilers did STL well for some time)
If you definitelly need speed AND flexibility, I'd write the main application logic and GUI in full Java, then profile the application to find out those parts that really need to be accelerated, and write those as C++ code (you'd be VERY surprised at how easy it is to do this with Java; your Java code wouldn't even know that it is calling C++ code).
Give it a try, that way you can use only one IDE for all of your code (NetBeans, Forte, JBuilder, Visual Age, are all good tools).
I'm guessing you'll get plenty of suggestions to change your language, which is certainly something to consider if you have that option.
But if you're like me, you don't have that option. You've got a load of C++ that's not simply going to magically transform into Python or Java overnight.
I would suggest the hard road. Boil down supported standard features in the compilers that you can use and tell people to stick to that list unless they can make a case that all of the compilers now support the new feature that they want to use.
Although I feel it is dated now, Netscape used to publish such a guide for their developers.
For example, in our early days, we would not permit namespaces or RTTI.
Now, as compilers have gotten more supportive of the ISO C++ standard, we permit those features in our codebase.
But we haven't yet decided to open the floodgates on exception handling, although it's supported pretty broadly.
Finally, you really need an automated build system that runs the latest repository snapshots through the compilers on all the platforms and throws the results up on a web page, like Tinderbox.
That will tend to enforce good standards as developers will see that their check-in attempts fly through with green and no warnings, or get dirty yellow about warnings, or red with downright errors during the build.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Why not see what others who are facing the same issue have done? In particular, I'm thinking of mozilla, which is another C++ application which has builds for Linux x86, Windows, OS X, OS/2, HPUX, AIX and Solaris.
Yeah, they had to make their own toolkit (XUL), but I don't know if you need one (it wasn't totally clear from the question).
In particular, check out this helpful document the mozilla team made about writing portable C++ code.
http://www.talknerdy.org
I have written many cross-platform projects in C++ without a problem. All I did was identify low-level platform dependent issues and encapsulate them within subroutines, typedefs & #defines etc. Then write software using regular C++ code and use portability library. Example: typedef unsigned long PORTA_PID; // This function returns the current process ID.
PORTA_PID getProcessID(void);
As a previous respondent said, GUIs are a different matter. I would suggest to standardize on one GUI environment such as Java (or even MFC) and split the functionality so the GUI was a thin shell that communicates with the main business logic that exists in other C++ processes.
You don' need no stinkin' tools, the amount of code required in the portability library is very small.
That's my 2$. I'm worth more than 2c (just).
I don't understand why people even look at Makefiles anymore now that Ant exists. We've completely automated all of our builds and deploys across NT, Linux and Solaris with it, across different architectures and different locations.
I'm not going to expound on using Java, since it is fairly ubiquitous these days and if it would work for you, I'm sure you would have already considered it.
`for(int i=0;in;i++); for(int i=0;in;i++);' is the right way accounding to the c++ standard, the wrong way is `for(int i=0;in;i++); for(i=0;in;i++);'
While we're talking about switching languages, why not Common Lisp? It compiles to native code and has all the features mentioned (fast numerical code, vendor support for multithreading (this will likely be standardized now that J13 has decided to meet again), portable graphics (CLIM), very platform-neutral, no more rat nest makefiles - hell, no more making at all). The only downside is that Allegro CL is the only compiler continuing support for SGIs (although it also supports hp-ux, aix and various flavor of DEC unix, with no extra porting effort unless you're doing tricky FFI). If the contract is large enough, it might be possible to convince Xanalys to port Lispworks to the SGI again (I'm fairly certain it ran on that platform sometime in the past).
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
You're joking, right? Perhaps I'm a little behind the times, but I was under the impression that GCC used a register based architecture where VC++ uses a stack based architecture. While GCC might spit out some average performing code with the default options, using -O3 will produce very fast running code. I've compared the performance of code compiled with GCC vs. the same program written in assembler, and at its best, GCC is only 50% slower than hand coded assembly, which is very good considering that some very well respected compilers will produce code that is 10 times slower than hand coded assembly.
I've also looked at the assembly language output of VC++, and it's a joke. VC++ often inserts large sections of extraneous instructions into the code. I've managed to follow function calls in VC++, and it is not uncommon for a function call to have prolog and epilog code of several dozen instructions. Interestingly, GCC uses a register based schema, and I can actually follow the code pretty easily, in spite of the fact that it uses the AT&T syntax. GCC just produces cleaner code.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Have you considered java? Sounds insane, I know but Java3D seems to be coming of age and I've seen some pretty impressive large data visualisation demos written in it. It saves you a lot of headaches with cross platform development issues.
I realise that most people think of Java only as a server side technology but Sun has been putting a lot of effort into making it more appealing to the scientific programming community. You should really give it another chance.
Yours truly,
You know who, eh? :-)
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I do not know why noone considers Java as performant.
.NET is language-independent, supposedly platform-independent, being an open standard and all, and performant, as its compiled and not runtimed.
I have a few words / acronyms...
1. JIT. As in Just-In-Time compilation. Meaning Java software approaches native speed as time goes on.
2. JNI. As in Java Native Interface. Ok, so you have a couple C++ libraries that really have to be as fast as they possibly can be, without necessarily incurring the wrath of the platform demon by being written in assembly. That doesn't mean that the 90% of your code that doesn't vastly effect the performance of your system ALSO has to be written in C++.
3. Silicon. As in what chips are made of. Including chips that run Java. Though these are really targetted at the embedded market, to have your coffee machine run Java or whatever, a high-performance version is available. It plugs into your PCI bus. And runs Java there instead of in the main processor.
Oh, not exactly on-topic, but insert obligatory note of how
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Go out and download and install Java's sdk. Also, take a look at jama.
Java is not currently an option for the high-performance numerical and immersive graphical aspect of our applications.
So what you're saying is:
You've coded it in Java, used native methods where applicable, optimized it, ran it, and it was too slow on every single hardware configuration known to man.
Or are you just guessing?
If you posted on Slashdot hoping we'd help you, give us the details. How "not an option" is it?
-... ---
Also, you can try the cross platform operating system facility from the same mozilla project.s pr.ht ml
Check out
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/about-n
I still prefer Tcl (with Itcl for object-oriented programming). It's the easiest software environment to work with for me. I also use websh and dtcl extension for apache (tcl.apache.org).
Using TCL you'll have a very compact and clean code.
Step 1. Go to http://java.sun.com and download the JRE 1.4.1.
Step 2. Visit http://www.datadino.com and click on "Webstart Now!".
Step 3. Right click and save Meat Fighter. Find where you saved the JAR file and double click.
Step 4. Right click and save Duke Nukes Stuff. Double click on the JAR.
Step 5. Visit jGoodies and try their wide variety of products.
If you are under Linux, I'm afraid the games probably won't perform well. (Little issue with getting X to be configured to handle high speed direct-framebuffer graphics). However, DataDino should work, although you may need to get the installer instead of using the super-cool WebStart link (Mozilla problem only!). If you don't have a database to use, visit the "Supported Databases" page and download the test HSQLDB database.
The plain and simple fact is that Java is fighting two issues:
1. Poorly written apps that give all Java apps a bad name. (For example, "genius" A decides to load a table before releasing the event thread. Table takes 5 minutes to load and user gets annoyed. The solution would have been to load the table in a separate thread so that the user can see and interact with the table items as they are being loaded.)
2. Perceived performance vs. actual performance. People see Swing and the default look and feel and instantly "feel" that the app is slower than windows. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In all reality, it is probably running faster than the Windows app, it just doesn't seem right. This is caused by the Java L&F being way too "flat". Your brain doesn't quite connect the buttons and other objects as being solid objects to be manipulated.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
MKS Toolkit does a terrific job of integrating a Unix ksh-based CLI with WinNT/2K/XP, and couples closely with IBM DB/2 so that you can run DB/2 UDB scripts as you can under AIX. It is expensive, but worth it if you can afford it.
Qt is a very, very nice cross-platform development library. Another option you could look at used to be Neuron Data's Elements Environment, but they renamed the company (www.blazesoft.com) and I don't know if they still sell EE as a seperate product (Advisor is a repackaging of their rule-base software, which was built on EE.)
There are also the ever-present Rogue Wave class libraries, but I don't think they'll address your GUI requirements. However, if you use it to split out the core application functionality from the presentation (GUI), it might be helpful.
A solid set of macros with compiler/platform detection directives can help a great deal for porting code, though many people prefer to use sed or perl scripts instead (ala config.) Macros have the advantage of dealing with portability more consistently, and localize the changes for platforms to the headers and migration binding code (usually done as a base library.)
Using cross-platform libraries such as xml.apache.org libraries, IBM's ICU (Unicode support), et. al. can also make your code much more portable without requiring extra work after the initial coding.
There are also various open source projects that provide portable thread libraries, portable GUI toolkits, etc.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Java is not currently an option for the high-performance numerical and immersive graphical aspect of our applications. Read: "We don't want to learn Java" No Java programmer who read that believes you. The answer is that what you can learn to do in Java in 5 DAYS won't be fast enough, but if you're willing to either hire a good contractor (for gods sake ask to SEE something he's built though), or take 8 weeks or so to get GOOD, you can EASILY do this in Java...Unless of course you are doing special effects for ILM, in which case I humbly apologize, and I've got some questions about the next movie.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
As far as makefiles go, cmake looks promising. It seems to be a generalized Imake replacement. I haven't used it, but looks interesting. It is now part of the cygwin toolchain.
as far as tools go, look at cygwin. My company uses gnumakefiles on NT and UNIX, with generalized Makefiles for each project, and platform specific build rules in universal gmake include heeaders. We use ACE for a lot of the cross platform C++ stuff, a lot of our things are servers so we avoid the cross platform GUI stuff.
Would a cross-platform SDK with a C API do, instead of C++? C is more efficient than C++ for many purposes and much nicer for integration.
You might want to take a look at Probatus Spectra SDK. It provides many standard and advanced functionalities, as well as many helpful high-level frameworks for networking, globalization, and so on. A comprehensive cross-platform compatibility layer is an integral feature of the SDK.
You mentioned that you need especially threading. Probatus Spectra SDK provides a very nice cross-platform API for threading. For example, it cross-implements the conditional variables in Unix threads and thread events in Windows.
It also has an excellent build system based on a framework of makefiles that hides all platform-dependent issues.
The currently supported platforms are Linux, Solaris (Forte compiler), HP-UX, IBM AIX, Tru-64 and MS Windows (VC++ and Borland C++ Builder compilers). Both 32- and 64-bit platforms are supported for Solaris,
Definitely check out:
FLTK - http://www.fltk.org/ - light-weight
cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with
OpenGL support, etc.
Boost - Portable, peer-reviewed C++ libraries
including threading support, etc.
I print, therefore I am.
Honestly, I would use Visual Studio only as a deveopment environment -- but NOT rely on it. The other platforms will be easy enough to just use whatever text-editor the developers are comfortable with.
I tried Intel's compiler for the first time today on Windows, and it's far superior to the one that comes with VC 6.0... it integrates nicely with the IDE (remember, the IDE is just an IDE, the compiler is a command-line utility) and -- in my case (fourier transforms, MP3 decoding) it produces code that is a LOT faster (though compile time is slower, output is larger...)
Point being, there is no reason (ever) to tie yourself to visual studio. It's a glorified text editor, really, and as long as you keep it that way (stay away from MFC et al) then it won't introduce any problems with cross-platform programming. I personally run a couple of (private) cross-platform projects, and the best advice is to treat code as code. Don't rely on any of VS's magic, just use it as an environment that lets you edit text and compile with the push of the F7 key.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
We have very similar needs in the medical software industry and we find RogueWave to be a pretty good solution for our cross platform C++ needs. They have various libraries (database abstraction, STL, math, etc.) which are all cross platform and provide decent performance. There is still some tweaking to be done to get all platforms to compile clean but it is much less than what we had before we moved to RogueWave.
I seriously question whether your claim is true.
I work on a serious cross-platform app at present. We build on something like 15 different platforms, from the latest Metrowerks CodeWarrior on the Mac and VS.NET on Windoze to antiquated HP-UX things and God knows how many Solaris builds.
Today, I wrote a singly linked list class. I wanted it to be generic, so I defined it all using macros. Am I insane? Not at all. Several of our compilers don't support even basic templates properly, and if you look up STL in the help, you'll find no match. You can't get more modern compilers on some of these platforms, and even if we could, we're supplying to other development companies and are constrained to make our code work on whatever compilers they develop with.
I could have written everything much more cleanly using templates, in much less time, or even faster still just used std::list, but then it wouldn't have built on something like half of our compilers. These things get confused when you combine overloading and overriding sometimes (what's the using keyword, anyway?) so more advanced techniques are right out of the Window.
Boost is a fabulous thing. I sincerely hope that several parts of it make the next C++ standard, and fix up some of the glaring gaps in the current one. But while it's intended to be written in standard C++, and as time goes by it will become more widely useful, you could never call the sort of code they use "portable" in an industrial engineering sense at present. Portable amongst recent compilers on popular platforms, yes, but outside that scope, it's an academic toy that is of no practical use.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Like he said , if i is declared previously, then there's nothing wrong. If you have
int i;
for(int i=0;in;i++); for(i=0;in;i++);
Then you're fine. The compile might warn you that the second declaration of i shadows an existing variable, but that's all.
(Me, I can't get over how ";in;" is supposed to be valid...)
Think about Point #2 in this context. How many programs have you tried that you are surprised to learn are Java? If you said none, you probably aren't looking hard enough. (Hint: Look for the java.exe file in the installation directory.) You tend to recognize Java apps by their distinctive look. The distinctive look has problems with perceived performance. As such, many good programmers change it to use a non-standard look.
After you visit jGoodies, you should understand more of what I mean.
As for Point #1. I don't know enough about MFC to be 100% sure, but I believe that Windows automatically handles repainting when you are populating complex objects such as tables. (e.g. You'll tend to notice large tables in SQL Server Enterprise Manager paint nothing in the table as you scroll. Instead, you can watch the text filled in after the fact.) Swing (the Java GUI toolkit) requires the programmer to make these optimizations. Why? Because that's who *should* be doing it.
What if for some reason, I want to design a scrollable table that is fast enough when pulling data over dial-up connections? Under Java, I might design it so that the data doesn't display until the user stops scrolling, or I might display partial data. Under MFC, do I have much choice? Not without jumping through a great deal of hoops.
Notice how Microsoft writes new components every time they have a new piece of software (e.g. Office toolbars, Outlook shortcut bar, etc.). They do this to improve performance in their programs. Java programmers shouldn't have to rewrite GUI components, just data models. However, few and far between is the programmer who actually does this.
BTW, another spot you might want to visit is
Swing Sightings. You can find links to all kinds of well written Java programs.
If you'd like to try a Java program that uses native components instead of Java Swing, try Eclipse. While I personally don't like it, it should help you understand the perceived problem a little more.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Don't write Makefiles yourself. Instead write a script that translates simple build rules (foo.cpp -> foo.o -> foo.exe) into a custom Makefile for each platform. I went this route after battling for years with complex Makefile rules that never quite worked.
A wonderful alternative to make is Jakarta Ant. It's java based, but there are ways to get it to work with C/C++ files and compilers. You can create an entire build/test/deploy process with Ant.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
It doesn't mention Linux compatibility, only that it has been 'designed to appeal to the Unix and Linux communities' - basically they're pushing the standards compliance a lot.
There will always be compatibility issues... VC.NET is a lot better than VC6 but there are holes, like MS' continued habit of putting underscores in front of 'unix compatible' names (snprintf for example), and calling other things completely differntly (eg. strcasecmp).
For the hevily computational stuff use C++ native libraries if the java "prototype" doesn't work for you everything else (persistance, interface, brokering) use Java.
This stuff is done for real. At IBM I worked on a very large project that compiled on AIX (several distinct versions that we were sensitive to) Solaris, Windows NT, Linux, HPUX, and supposedly OS/400 although I never actually built the OS/400 piece nor have I seen it operate. First things first, you need good coding conventions, don't let some punk break them either. Secondly you have to design some abstractions and build some foundation classes; or buy a really good set or downlaod some good free ones, I've heard positive things about ACE. This is mostly a problem with windows any more, back a few years you might support win16, win32, PM, and UNIX now it's pretty much just POSIX and Windows. You need to abstract the machine stuff out. Threads, possibly strings and such (Unicode vs. non-unicode..) possibly basic types (big endian vs. little) networking code.. A rule of thumb is that on this kind of project you should never talk to the OS directly without something in between, it's a huge effort to make that OS abstraction layer or learn the ins and outs of an off the shelf one but it's worth it, even if you pay with a little performance. Nothing sucks more than coding away on AIX building some cool classes and adding some cool new stuff, then checking it in and finding that it doesn't compile on any other platforms.. and you've got to figure that crap out ASAP to make a deadline. If you build one from scratch, as IBM usually does or did, you can tune some things for your application; your OS abstraction layer can be a great "helper" or "utility" layer.
Typically well coded C and C++ can go from compiler to compiler pretty easily. Then you can use Pro64 on Mips, ACC on sparc, Intel C on Windows for performance critical portions of code. You have to be smart about it though and use some good conventions. The biggest rule would be avoid MS Visual Studio which is by far the most non-standard setup out there and if you do use it don't use their projects unless you have to. Some good make files with some good rules can help make this pretty easy. I don't know why more people don't do it but look at the Linux kernel's rules file. I have a Rules.make that I've built up and it includes things like different options for debug builds, profiled builds, and optimized builds, sets up some common rules for compiling C++ code and C code and what have you. My makefile include that file and then they are usually pretty short, generally not much more than a list of .cxx files and a library name.
Then it's easy to make sweeping changes too. I think a good build
system, one that will last should usually take a day or two to kind of
put together pretty early on in a project, unless you can carp some
good stuff from another project. The goal is a flexable and reliable
build system that you don't have to worry about. Far too often people
start cobbeling a build system together and then after 6-9 months it's
broken and britle and hard to change because so many things have been
changed and added through out the project. Put some effort in up
front, consolidate your rules in to one place, use some environment
variables to control some build switches. Use some shell scripts to
figure out various things, not hundreds of lines of Bourne shell code,
just little bits. Do this until AAP is ready and rocking and then use
that. Also, if it needs to be said, use GNU Make; it runs damn near
everywhere and it's pretty good at what it does the 15 minutes it
takes to learn it will save you hours and even days worth of time in
the long run.
I'm a huge advocate of a solid and strong build. Mozilla is a project that festered for weeks or maybe even months becuase you couldn't build the damn thing when it went open source. Building code is something that can be done so well by tools that if you're worried about it then you need to fix the build. Building software is hardwork so take the pieces you can out of the equation, the build is the first one.
Next, I assume you've abstracted out the GUI from the meat. If not, make this job one if you wish to have any chance in hell against your one platform competitors or even your mulitplatform competitors when you get down to it. View/Data Model and client/server: learn it, live it, love it. Or switch to a web based interface, lot's of people do it.
While we're on abstraction. If you guys are really serious then you're probably going to have machine specific components. Look at /usr/src/linux/include and /usr/src/linux/arch for a starting point of
reference. I would envision a project like this have a set of small Mips,
Wintel, Linux-x86, etc. directories. Everything else can probably be
compiled with GCC and then in those directories you'd have your
assembly and machine specific compiled code.
Lastly, you want to have a staged check in process. People hate not being able to commit code but at the same time you don't want them to commit code for real until it compiles on all of your platforms. Honestly, I don't know of a really good way to do this. Set up a build lab, do nightlies against the real code. Do nightlies against the "staged" code. Then have some kind of weekly merge meeting. That's how I've seen it, it's time consuming and somewhat painful. You bite off too much and you're spending a shitload of time merging stuff.
gcc 3.2 is generally superior to VC++ emitted code,
in my experience.
Mingw32 is the target of choice if you don't want
to license Cygwin.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
You might use Java for the interface and use JNI (Java Native Interface) to attach computation and rendering modules onto the VM.
I know of several games that use Java interfaces and then run a real time simulation written in C++.
Maybe you could build on a third-party threading lib?
It seems you have two issues: having a managable build environment, and finding different compilers that agree on what c++ is.
There is an utility, CMake (do a search), which is a CrossPlatform make tool. You set up some high level specifications (which files belong to which object, etc.) and it generates the platform specific make files (or VisualStudio projects) automatically. I have used it a little bit, to develop the software for linux and windows, but don't know if it would meet all your needs.
As far as getting all your compilers (and headers, and libraries, etc.) to agree, the easiest solution would be to use the same compiler on each platform (gcc). To address some comments others have posted: for numerical applications running on Windows (at least the ones I compile), gcc by far outperforms VC7. It is a much more agressive optimizer, and has optimizations for P4 that VC does not yet have.
Go to java.sun.com and you'll find the 64 bit VMs designed for Sun's big iron. These VMs are the ones that take ultra busy J2EE servers to task.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I would sugest the same thing though. Write your whole app in Python. That's your base. Port each function that needs to be ported to C++. At the end you'll have something much more maintainable.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
You're confusing C and C++ libraries.
glibc is the GNU C library, and the system library for most Linux platforms. The C++ library is libstdc++-v3, which is completely separate.
The MS 6.0 compiler used the most recent version of Dinkumware's C++ library at the time. I don't know what they used for 7.0, but Dinkumware has continued to update and improve their libraries. They even had bugfixes for their headers that MS hasn't included with 6.0, so you could patch them yourself.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I love perl, for one page, quick-n-dirtys. But it's 'more than one way to do it' aproach leads to confusion and strife in larger projects.
May I suggest a look at Python?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I have been programming C++ professionally for over 10 years on many Unix and Windows platforms (Sun Forte, MS Visual Studio, etc), and I can tell you that nothing comes close to ProjectBuilder, InterfaceBuilder, and dozens of other tools on OS X. The good news (for those who always think everything Apple must be expensive) is that they are absolutely free, so save that $2500 for Visual Studio.NET and buy yourself a decent G4 TiBook with a real OS and all those free tools.
With GCC 3.1, you can programming in mixed C / C++ and Objective C / C++ in the same file or project. ProjectBuilder provides the best IDE and CLI for building multiple projects with dependency and multi-targets and multi-phases, apart from editing source files, icons, graphics, sound, document, etc.
InterfaceBuilder is the only tool on earth that actually allows you to design and test professional UI with virtually no user code.
And Qt is soooo much easier to use :) The heavy licensing fee is something I'm willing to pay when do commercial development with a toolkit that makes my task substantially easier.
Actually my comment was not aimed at the validity of your ascertation, instead it was designed to point out the hypocracy of it.
I don't want to come off sounding mean spirited, that is not my intention, but lets be real here. You're saying that "big business" as an entity has a tendency to put it's wants and needs before others. Well that sounds like pretty much most "living" things. Of course many do take this too far, both humans and corps, no denying that. But to generalize and stereotype and accuse but yet not do the sacrifices that would not group yourself into the same category as those you blast, now that is weak.
As to your last statement, I completely, 100% disagree. Big business LOVES me (and you), because you and I are the ones that allow it to exist and flourish. We buy the products, we vote for the "bought" politicians, what's not to love?
gcc is built for portability, not speed. VC++'s code is faster
This is no longer true, vanilla Microsoft Visual C++ is not faster than GCC anymore. There are compilers which can do much better than GCC on certain platforms, but Visual C++ isn't one of the, usually.
In addition, unless you've got some real-time applications which scratches at the limits of the currently available hardware, machine code quality doesn't matter a lot. If you use a compiler, you've already made a compromise in terms of effort vs. speed, and maybe you can shift the balance even further and concentrate on features which directly benefit your customers instead of dealing with cross-vendor compatibility issues.
That's why you have a build environment and strangle anyone who plays around with it. As long as the build environment is identical with the target platform you dont get that sort of trouble.
Autoconf and automake are a bit troublesome to set up, and they wont give you an immediate benefit until you migrate your checks over to use them, but there's a reason that so many portable opensource products use them. As long as you use them the way they're meant to be used they solve a whole range of portability problems, and will cut down the time spent on portability by a lot.
I don't care so much about Java, but with Python, it's just that a lot of its cool features are also in Lisp, like functions-as-data, classes with metaclasses and the ability to define and change them at runtime, dynamic typing, docstrings, the REPL/interactive prompt, keyword and "rest" arguments to functions, ability to fix bugs without having to stop the running program, ... However, it lacks, for example, macros (don't even try to compare the power and beauty of Lisp macros to the C preprocessor!) and good native code compilers, optional type checking and a variety of free and proprietary implementations all adhering to the same standard.
As for syntax: Both Lisp and Python have the problem that people, esp. newbies, hate their syntax (the parentheses in Lisp and the significant whitespace in Python). Most people eventually get over it and even get to like it. Just because a language doesn't look like C doesn't make it bad.
You are right about the lack of easy-to-find, ready-to-use libraries for common tasks, however (not about the "standardized" part, however. Last I looked there was no Python standard.) There are some projects to change that, for example CLOCC, but there's still a long way to go.
IMHO, the single greatest problem Lisp has is non-technical. It is the (wrong) perception that the only data type in Lisp are lists, that there is no OO, or even iteration, that it is interpreted and slow, and generally dead. I'm not interested in forcing anyone to use Lisp, but I for one do like it, and if you are looking for a cool language to learn next, I'd say you definitely should have a look at it.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
We use the 'understand C++' tool (www.SCITools.com) to provide a window into 1.5 million lines of C and C++ code. You configure this tool by telling it the subdirectory trees of your source code, and this tool builds a database of every file, object, line of source. It then provides both textual and graphical navigation tools for your code, including dependency trees.
It has an integrated editor with syntax highlighting, and shows what code is #ifdef'ed out.
I don't work for the company, but I've found the tool very useful. For your purposes, it should help locate where mods should be done, and what mods to do differently based on your different compilers and platforms. There are versions that run on Windows and Unix -- I use the Windows version, and 'point' it at my Windows and DEC VMS code.
Sounds like Java too me, with browsers as a front end. You can do some really wonderful stuff, and it won't take a long time to build with Java IDE's that are around for free.
.Net implementation, it would cost way too much.
.Net tools alone will save you the cost over the long run they will have to endure to maintain thier systems.
Java also is fairly easy to add multiple machines (spread out your Virtual Machines) to get more processing power out of commodity PC's. There isw simply no way your competitors could scale thier code on an equivalent Windows
I gurantee you if you proceed along those lines your competitors investment in
Java 1.4 compiler technology (Virtual Machines) is very very good. If you are using numerical processing and large array types the effort you pour into C++ is simple not worth it.
I am skeptical of your claims that Java is too slow. I suspect you haven't really used it for much of anything lately, because the slow excuse is an old one.
You can go into any Barnes and Nobles book store and literally get a small stack on numerical procedures in Java and how to build distributed processing systems with Java, right off the shelf.
If you don't know how to do it, let me know (reply), my company does these seemingly impossible things with Java everyday.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.