Re: New Delphi roadmap is coming: NO UNICODE PLEASE!

Jolyon Smith wrote:

i.e. do you see concrete _dis_advantages of choosing .NET for the
desktop, or merely not perceive any real _ad_vantage?

Here's some.
1) If your application generates lots of small objects, the GC becomes
inefficient. Also the desktop GC is single threaded, even if your
computer is multicore. (IIRC, the current Delphi memory manager tries
to handle multithreaded applications fairly efficiently.) Also, the
..net memory manager likes to allocate twice the memory currently in
use, iirc. This can be bad if you're using large amounts of data. (So,
on a machine with 4 GB of memory, a 64 bit .net application could run
out of memory before a 32 bit native code application.) This really
depends on what's being allocated, and when, of course.

2) Distribution problems:
2a) You can't run a desktop binary off a network drive without
tweaking the local computer's security settings.
2b) While ClickOnce is a really cool and easy way to distribute
applications, it's horribly broken. Applications require a certificate
to be deployed, and once your certificate expires, the users have to
uninstall/reinstall the application. (The people who designed ClickOnce
didn't understand how renewing certificates work, so that's not an
option.) The only work around is a utility from MS to edit test
certificates to set their expiration dates way in the future. They're
not expecting a fix until next year at the earliest, last I heard.

3) It's bad for plug-ins: MS strongly discourages writing plug-ins
using managed code. The reason is that if you have two different
plug-ins written in different versions of the framework, the first one
loaded wins. So, if you load a .net 1.1 plug-in before a .net 2.0
plug-in, the 2.0 one will probably crash. (If everything's written in
the same version of .net, this doesn't apply, of course.)


--
Mike Swaim swaim@xxxxxxxxxx at home | Quote: "Boingie"^4 Y,W & D
MD Anderson Division of Quantitative Sciences
mpswaim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx or mswaim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx at work
ICBM: 29.763N 95.363W|Disclaimer: Yeah, like I speak for MD Anderson.
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