Re: Dynamic linking with LD_PRELOAD - get it compiled

On Sat, 15 Mar 2008 15:11:04 -0700 (PDT) jason.cipriani@xxxxxxxxx <jason.cipriani@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

| David, while everything you say about reusability and proper software
| design is true and valid, unless you actually cite the specific source
| for this "all software must be properly designed, modular, reusable,
| and portable" that you seemed to have made up, your entire original
| attack on poor Mr. Bauer completely falls apart.

It's actually a rather common principle. OTOH, I think that principle
is overused and too often misapplied ... especially the reusable part.
I separate a lot of the software I write into library functions and main
programs. The library functions are intended to be reusable. The main
programs are not.

When writing a new program, I try to understand how widely it could be
used for its purpose. But I won't consider making it usable for purposes
I cannot imagine.


| Can you fill us all in on where that rule is? Is that part of a
| standard or something? This may be hard to believe, but Johannes
| Bauer's kludgey application is not the only one of it's kind out
| there. In fact, there may be hundreds of thousands, even millions, of
| programs that people have written that don't get the International
| Organization of Perfectly Designed Application's 100% Seal of Quality
| Approval. Millions! How can you sleep at night, knowing that somewhere
| there is a program that compiles on somebody's computer, but not on
| yours? How can you sleep at night, knowing that somewhere there is an
| application with source code that can't be infinitely copied, pasted,
| expanded, and reused? How do you feel knowing that your kids may be
| using computers with poorly designed applications on them?? Your own
| children, for God's sake! Using improperly designed applications! What
| is this world coming to?

Whenever I need to write something that is very machine specific to one
single machine, I have no qualms about doing that. I have done it many
times. And there are plenty of examples around of programs and functions
that are very machine specific. And device drivers are, too, but that is
an obvious special case.


|> It used to be that you had no choice. A general-purpose whatever would
|> be too bulky and slow to be an option. But now you have a choice.
|
| Precisely. The last sentence hits the nail on the head.

You mean we should still have a choice between a highly optimized machine
specific program and a (relatively) slow and bulky (but comfortably fast
on today's machines) portable version, where one can run 20 of the former
or 3 of the latter at the same time on a given modern machine?

--
|---------------------------------------/----------------------------------|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net / spamtrap-2008-03-17-0826@xxxxxxxx |
|------------------------------------/-------------------------------------|
.

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