7 Oct
2008
7 Oct
'08
4:40 p.m.
Hoi Beat,
On Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:07:45 +0200
Beat Rubischon <beat(a)0x1b.ch> wrote:
The major advantage for OpenSource is the visibility
of the code - no code
monkey is able to hide 20 years old buggy crap when he needs to provide the
sources. Believe me, this is a great motivation for a lot of coders out
there ;-)
I've never seen 20y old code in any OSS project (ok, i've never
bothered to look at such old projects), but i know more than one
project that contains crap code that is 10y old and nobody dares
to touch it, because nobody fully understands it. So that argument
is pretty much void ;-)
Even more, when you pay licenses host or by CPU, which
means today
_per_core_, why should a commercial software supplier optimize their
binaries? Even simple tasks like using a commercial compiler instead of gcc,
which gives 10-100% additional performance, is often not done as the
compiler costs $1000 extra - compare this with the several hundred thousends
the scoftware company usually earns per year...
Anyone who has ever written more than a few lines of C code knows
that gcc is crap... unfortunately, it's the best compiler out there.
The comercial compilers usualy segfault at every second file of my
favorite compiler testbench, commonly known as FFmpeg. Well, at least
Intel did a good job of fixing most of their bugs, but it took them years.
How long it will take sun to fix their compiler, which is even worse is
anyones guess.
And i'm not yet talking about compiler that emit incorrect code.
Attila Kinali
--
If you want to walk fast, walk alone.
If you want to walk far, walk together.
-- African proverb