
Why we didn’t convert to .Net. And perhaps we never will - fogus
http://wings-of-wind.com/2009/11/09/why-we-didnt-convert-to-net-and-perhaps-we-never-will/
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jws
_…several orders of magnitude faster (5-7 times)_ – which leaves one wondering
if he doesn't understand the term, or doesn't realize that most people use
base10 arithmetic.

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prodigal_erik
It's true the original GC for .NET was amazingly bad, so much so that the
project I was on at Microsoft deliberately used indexes into big arrays of
structs (rather than real object references) for long-lived server state. But
surely they've been working on it. GC even has the potential to be faster than
manual heap management simply because any number of dead objects can be
reclaimed in zero cycles.

I don't understand why he's rejecting C and C++ as unsafe yet using Delphi.
Doesn't that also have pointer arithmetic and casts and dangling references?

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CWuestefeld
...Yet both Delphi and C# were designed by the same guy (Anders Hejlsberg),
and thus much of the learning from Delphi was able to influence C# (and the
CLR).

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ph33t
i wouldn't dispute that c# is a fine language. i wouldn't argue that object
pascal is better than c#. i would, however, argue that delphi, mostly because
of its incredible two-way design interface is a terrific development
environment, superior than any forms designer included with visual studio. i
don't know what hand anders had in the interface builder of delphi, but its
better than visual studio's (better than all of the vb verions, etc).

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ubernostrum
Article author seems to be under the misconception that acceptable performance
always requires a fully-compiled application (and seems to make decisions by
comparing mature battle-tested versions of X to early/initial versions of Y).
I don't honestly know what specific domain he's working in, but I do know that
the number of domains in which that's true is increasingly tiny.

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Slashed
Agree! Sometimes you won't get that good performance with compiled
applications. C Programmers really have to know how the machine works to get
good performance in a real-life project. On the other hand, JVM is great at
optimizing and its performance has been improved very well over the last few
years.

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hvs
Augh, I couldn't read the whole thing. Was it written by James Joyce? Because
the whole stream-of-consciousness thing doesn't really work for technical
articles.

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johnbender
"almost every programmer with which we spoke about XAML said that ‘if you want
to do serious things, forget about designer, do it by hand’ – we said, no
way!"

I've never used Delphi, but I wouldn't let layout generators build my
interface for me regardless of the technology.

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pbz
So when working with WinForms (.NET) you build the forms without the designer?

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kaitnieks
For me the biggest problem with .NET is the fact that it doesn't generate true
binaries and the deployment problems (framework needs to be installed). The
advantage of Delphi is that it compiles everything into a single exe file that
just works properly everywhere on any Windows machine. But if you develop in-
house software or custom software for a specific customer then these reasons
probably don't matter.

I have tried writing a few applications in .net and I liked it. I think it's
really great for the programmer because C# language has lots of features that
I really want to see in Delphi's pascal. Still, Delphi (I'm still using the
old Delphi 7) is my favourite development tool.

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xpaulbettsx
This guy is still living in 2001, most of his arguments are pretty much
nonsense, and I am highly skeptical of his performance claims

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ryanelkins
At first I really thoguht this article was written in one language and
translated to English, or written by an application. Actually, after having
finished it, I'm still not sure.

As for the merits of the article - meh - it seems to mostly be based on the
writer's experience with early versions of .NET and the framework has come
along way. An interesting read, but perhaps not quite relevant anymore.

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geuis
Forgiving the poor grammar, just let it be known that nearly every point
mentioned in this rant against .Net is untrue.

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mTh
Hmmm... can you give some arguments?

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nkohari
The majority of the arguments are just FUD. They might have applied in 2001,
but to write this post now is just silly. He complains about breaking changes
between 1.1 and 2.0 -- 2.0 came out in 2005. My guess is that he's really just
angry because Microsoft (and most developers) have moved on from Delphi.

Some of the arguments are reasonable when applied to desktop development, but
they're still pretty light on facts. None of them are particularly reasonable
when applied to web development.

He laments that GDI+ isn't hardware-accelerated, but if I recall correctly,
WPF (the newer UI toolkit that came out in 2007) is.

"Almost every programmer said you have to write XAML by hand" -- I won't
defend Microsoft's obsession with visual tools, but I learned that I have to
write HTML by hand years ago, and I'm not complaining.

String processing is slower? Probably because .NET strings are immutable,
which actually creates large performance _gains_ in the vast majority of
cases.

If your performance concerns are so stringent that you need to worry about
whether the type system in a language is rooted, you're either over-optimizing
or you should be working with C.

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mTh
I rather think that he's looking from another perspective. Using Delphi,
speaking about speed, complex GUIs which need a visual designer (etc.) means
that he is a desktop developer.

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bmcgee
I would love to see some well designed benchmarks making apples to apples
performance and memory usage comparisons between the two.

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clistctrl
I guess Microsoft clearly failed marketing to this guy. I see no evidence he
has actually ever touched anything .net related. I've never experienced
performance problems with .net due to the garbage collector (granted I've been
working with it since 2.0+ there may have been issues in 1.0) I think he is a
desktop developer, but from a web point of view it was slow due to the
viewstate... MVC solves that problem.

I chose ASP.NET MVC for my startup, and the ONLY downside is the slightly
higher server costs.

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bensummers
Re the higher server costs, have you looked at joining BizSpark? Although I
think you'd have to use co-lo to be able to take advantage of the free
production licenses.

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nkohari
We're in BizSpark. We have a dedicated server, and our hosting company
(SoftLayer) used our production licenses. (Great company in general, by the
way.)

