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by James Robertson.
Original Post: In the other camp...
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If you're still reading and haven't clicked your back button in disgust, let me explain. The most important thing is not how easy it is to build code, the most important thing is how well the code runs once it is built. This concept seems to have escaped the Longhorn developers, and from this viewpoint Longhorn and its underlying technologies are pretty unexciting.
Ole goes into quite a bit of depth as to how and why performance will suffer in LongHorn - along the way, he makes a number of interesting obseravtions - one of which I disagree strongly with:
I can appreciate that there may be debug code and features which haven't yet been optimized, but performance isn't something you add in later. It has to be designed in from the start. There were zero cases where I heard a presenter at the PDC say "this was done for performance". Functionality for developers was the guiding design principle.
Uh, no. The mantra is:
Make it work
Make it fast
In that order. In that regard, MS might even be approaching things the right way (although I have my doubts about their ability to get there). I suspect that this thought comes from Ole being a C++ developer - C++ being a language that is painful to refactor and introduce change into. Using better languages, one can rip out layers that cause problems and replace them (I've done this with parts of BottomFeeder all along, for instance).
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