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

[Brian "L." Matthews <blm@halcyon.com>]

Richard Gordon writes:
|First, have you found that when working in Perl, crashes are actually any
|more frequent under MacOS?

Yes, much more frequent. I can't remember the last time I core dumped a
Unix perl. Admittedly, probably 99.9% of my MacPerl problems are memory
related, but a crash is a crash, and Mac crashes are usually more deadly
than Unix crashes (see below).

|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.

That's generally a good thing to do.

|Under MkLinux (or unix in general), can you really count on stability
|without a reboot just by killing the errant process(es)?

On Unix in general, yes, you can just kill the errant processes and the
machine continues humming along nicely. I haven't used any of the linuxen,
but would be very surprised if they're any different.

|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?

Again, not having used MkLinux, I'd say yes, it is a waste of time

|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.

*If* your premise is correct I'd agree, but I don't believe it is. I've
developed software on the Mac, on numerous flavors of Unix, and on Windows.
When I'm developing on a Mac, 10 or more reboots a day isn't uncommon. When
I develop on Unix (assuming I'm working on an app and not a driver or the
kernel), the only time I'd reboot would be after a power outage or to
install new hardware or something.

For example, the Unix machine I'm using at my ISP, which has thousands of
users over the course of a week (although I suspect only a small number doing
any kind of software development), was last rebooted 10 days ago, and that
was because that's when they do monthly maintenance. Before that it hadn't
been rebooted for around 30 days, and that reboot was again because of
monthly maintenance. Another unix machine I work on hasn't been rebooted for
76 days, and that machine hosts only developers, as well as a fairly active
web server.

Of course Windows needs rebooting if you look at it wrong.

Hopefully MacOS X will at least make MacOS as stable and crash-resistant as
Unix, but until then, as far as machine stability goes for software
development, Unix wins *easily*.

Brian

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