Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mcgill-vision!odyssee!pinard
From: pinard@odyssee.UUCP (Francois Pinard)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: QNX anyone?
Summary: Small model is too small
Message-ID: <1286@odyssee.UUCP>
Date: 1 Jul 88 16:06:10 GMT
References: <22273@tis.llnl.gov> <4632@mnetor.UUCP> <962@gethen.UUCP>
Organization: Odyssee (ORA) inc., Montreal, Canada
Lines: 31

In article <962@gethen.UUCP>, isaac@gethen.UUCP (Isaac Rabinovitch) writes:
> In article <4632@mnetor.UUCP>, frank@mnetor.UUCP (Frank Kolnick) writes:
> >[The QNX C compiler ] only 
> > builds small-model tasks, which isn't so terrible if you take advantage of
> > the message-passing to build lots of small, co-operating tasks.
> That strikes me as a good way to develop programs, but which few
> programmers are likely to understand.

Even if debatable for efficiency considerations, I see your point for
executable code. 

But it does not apply when you need large (not so large, after all :-)
data space, for intepreters like LISP or Prolog, or when you are doing
anything requiring large arrays, like (sometimes) mathematical
programming or in-memory databases.

It does not apply either when you simply want to import external
software, which was not made explicitely for this system.  QNX looks
like a small, nice, development system that still needs a lot of
development (read: you cannot really escape doing development to use
it).

> Most PC programmers *love* the
> complicated addressing scheme in MS C and its ilk.

Has it come to your mind that maybe a lot of us just *hate* all this
complexity, but cannot get rid of it without throwing our machines in
the basket?
-- 
Francois Pinard    pinard@odyssee.uucp                       (514) 279-0716
`Vivement GNU!'    pinard%odyssee@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu    (514) 588-4656