Re: Delphi 2008 native?

In article <47ba0d01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, says...

I don't think we need a conspiracy

No, just Economics 101.

Companies need sales. To increase sales companies need to provides
motivation to their customers to keep buying new stuff. If their
customers don't NEED that stuff then those companies have to come up
with clever ways to make them THINK they do.


I don't think MS staff wander around thinking, "What will
slow the PC?"

Really? I think they do, but not in those terms precisely. They are
thinking "What will make our customers want to buy a new/upgraded OS
from us?" and at the same time Intel are thinking the same thing.

The combined effect is no different from if Microsoft and Intel *did*
sit down and collude.

In fact, in many ways, it might be better if they DID. Look at
platforms where hardware and OS are delivered as a single package (games
consoles, Mac, Amiga, your mobile phone etc etc) - I think without
exception they are easier to use and more reliable.


I'm not a .NET enthusiast, but I can see why MS introduced
it as a move toward safer, faster programming.

That may be what they SAID it was for. Bottom line - it was to get some
more sales.


"Pointer" languages like
C/C+ and Pascal make assumptions about the computer architecture

Fairly safe assumptions given that those assumptions continue to be
valid and aren't in any real danger of losing that status in the
foreseeable future.


An important difference between .NET and Pascal is that
.NET potentially can move objects to new memory locations *during*
execution

Um, that's got nothing to do with Pascal - Chrome is Pascal and produces
programs that perform very happily in a .NET environment.

And my native code has it's memory moved around the whole time - in and
out of the pagefile specifically.

:)


so that memory fragmentation is avoided

Ah. You mean the additional indirection between the code and the data
it is working with. How does that benefit the code? The developer?
The user?

Or is it perhaps just about selling the "benefits" of change in order to
justify $$ spend on that change?

Maybe?


Also, programs can run
on wildly different architectures, possibly as a step toward future machines
we have not yet dreamt of.

Build a dream machine THEN devise the best tools for it. Trying to
shape todays tools for machines about which we know nothing is only ever
going to result in compromised tools for today with no real certainty
that they will even be suitable in the future.


VB was becoming their nightmare

VB was *always* a nightmare.

:)


However, change will come.

Absolutely - the one universal truth of this industry:

Everything changes and Everything stays the same.



It would work poorly as a desktop machine with any modern OS. Just try
loading the latest desktop Linux - unusably slow!

The question has to be "Why?"

Why is it so slow?

AND

Why load the latest version if an old version is doing the job it needs
to do?


I looked in on my 14 year old son last night - he was playing a 3D game - it
looked like a movie, with leaves on the trees, explosions, hundreds of
soldiers all running around, lag-free response to the controls, LAN enabled.

And would you say more or less successful (in delivering an
entertainment experience) than DOOM?


That same game on my development machine is slow and blurry.

So play Doom/Quake on that PC - my guess is you will be having just as
much fun, and quite possibly MORE fun with those games.

There are familiar arguments to be trotted about about game-play vs eye-
candy. Economics 101 again - it comes down to "shifting boxes".

When games can be sold by how pretty they look, you get pretty, vacuous
games. When there are limits to how pretty a game can be, the game has
to deliver on the game-play.


My point is
that PCs are going to become more than Word, Excel, Firefox - we are looking
for better interfaces, instant response

"Better interfaces". "Better" being measured how? Intuitive,
functional and efficient should be the measure. I suspect you still
mean "prettier" though.

Instant response - funny thing is, that has always been a demand, and
developers have always managed to deliver on it.

Users today are running 3GHz workstations talking over 100Mb LANs to
RDBMS servers running multiple multi-GHz CPUs.

This is a world removed from the days when I cut my teeth in Windows
Client/Server, when workstations were 33MHz 386's, the LAN was 10Mb if
you were lucky, and the server was barely more powerful than the
workstation.

Workstations are 100x faster (in the CPU) the LAN is 10 (or sometimes
also 100) x faster, and servers are massively more powerful.

Are customers sub-second response targets now sub-milli-second targets?

No, they are still sub-second, because despite all this extra grunt
being thrown at the same old problems, stuff still just doesn't seem to
get any faster.


speech recognition.

You've been watching too much Star Trek.

:)

This isn't a technical problem, it's an interaction and contextual
problem. Recognising speech is fairly easy. Interpreting it and
knowing when it is being directed in a fashion that demands recognition
and interpretation and determining the context for that interpretation I
suspect will prove to be beyond the capabilities of computation
certainly in mine or my granchildrens lifetime.

imho


--
JS
TWorld.Create.Free;
.

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