Older blog entries for uweo (starting at number 1)

Yesterday i somehow managed to get about an hour to work on the string hashing library. Surprisingly enough one hour was enough to do a few space optimizations and package the whole stuff.
I sent Fefe a notice about it, he might be interested to include it into his libdjb project.

Today, on my way to work: well, i now have the dynamic string hashing library i wanted to write for about a year. Fine, but what about a fixed size record hashing library? The string length makes for about 8 bytes of overhead per record now.
Let's see whether there is a year between idea and realization this time.

Later. Fefe answered, he is interested, and is also interested in the getopt clone. This means i have to clean it up ... and update the documentation, which might be a good thing.

A completely unrelated note: advogato lacks a spell checker. Ok, that's not fair: improper spelling is my fault.

RickMuller: yes, almost right.
But i don't think that it depends on whether one can afford, for example, visual studio, or not. At least i can afford it (and that means that the majority of "others" can, too), but i will not waste money on that.

While i admit that the integrated development approach has it's value (especially for learners - the Pure-C IDE, back in the "old days" ;-) was quite helpful): i haven't seen in single one which doesn't limit you in some way. In almost every larger project you need to do something special which doesn't fit in the rules or hit some internal limits of the IDE.

With the toolbox approach you just exchange one tool which doesn't fit (obvious example: there a quite a number of make implementations and replacements). This doesn't really hurt. In the integrated world you have to bite the bullet: either use a workaround or replace it. The later is quite expensive since you may not only have to learn a new editor but may lose version control history or any other valuable feature of the old development environment. The former gets expensive over time.

In the business world the decision is easy: an integrated suite costs 1000$, plus 1000$ per year of maintainance, plus say 3000$ training. That's it. (yeah, i know, that's not the full truth).
The toolbox? 10 different programs? Can you calculate the cost and maintaince of that? And wait - part's of the system may be exchanged? We need a policy against that ...
Management thinks different, and management decides. In the open source world there's a different kind of management, and decisions are based on technical reasons or experience instead of policy.

Not to mention platform independence, of course.