Re: [MacPerl] Perl Shared Library (was Re: [MacPerl] ports and builds)

["Paul J. Schinder" <schinder@pobox.com>]

At 1:34 PM -0500 1/24/99, Richard Gordon wrote:

} On 1/23/99 at 09:26, pudge@pobox.com (Chris Nandor) wrote:
}
} > Oh, I forgot to add: I am going to be hacking perl source this weekend.  I
} > could do it on my Mac, or on my Mac with MkLinux.  I decided if I want to
} > actually accomplish something instead of rebooting a half dozen times, I
} > should do it in MkLinux.  I welcome the advance of Mac OS X so I can do it
} > in Mac OS.  But right now, for my sanity, I cannot.
}
} I'm not going to get into the middle of this except to note that while I
} find MacOS slick-cool, I find MkLinux spooky-cool and obviously a lot more
} powerful. Anyway, I did have some questions that relate to MkLinux (and unix
} in general) vs. MacOS in terms of desirability as development platforms.
}
} First, have you found that when working in Perl, crashes are actually any
} more frequent under MacOS?

Personally I find that I usually have real trouble with MacPerl only if I
run it out of memory.  Now that Chris has me up to 30 Mb, that won't happen
much any more :-)  But this, of course, isn't MacPerl's fault, but rather
it's MacOS's lame prmitive memory management that's ultimately to blame.
If I have tons of memory, I should be able to use it rather than be
artificially restricted.  When Unix perl runs out of memory, it might be
messy, but it won't affect anything else.

}
} Second, my app crash recovery procedure under MacOS is generally to reboot
} even if a force quit works because things tend to be unstable otherwise.
} Under MkLinux (or unix in general), can you really count on stability
} without a reboot just by killing the errant process(es)? I've broken MkLinux
} lots of times and usually reboot to be on the safe side, but wonder whether
} that's a waste of time or not?

Good Lord, why do you waste your time?  No Unix will permit a process to
trash another's memory partition, and an errant process can never hog the
machine, so there's absolutely no problem just proceeding.  That's what
being buzzword compliant, "protected memory", "preemptive multi-tasking",
means.  In general there's never a reason to reboot a Unix machine.  Let
power failures take care of it :-)

}
} If you take it for granted that any kind of development tends to result in
} lots of spectacular crashes and if a reboot after each crash is desirable
} even under unix, then it seems to me that it doesn't make much difference
} which platform you use unless MacOS is prone to actually crash the same app
} more frequently. Of course, that ignores the relatively long time that it
} takes MacOS to boot up, but I guess you see my point.

No, the whole point is that you don't have to reboot Unix, period.  The
operating system protects itself and other processes from rogue programs.
The only time I reboot Unix machines is when the X server locks up and I
don't want to find some other way to get in so I can kill it off, or when I
need to boot a new kernel.

}
} Richard Gordon
} Gordon Consulting & Design
} Voice: 770-565-8267  Fax: 770-971-6887
}

-----
Paul J. Schinder
schinder@pobox.com

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