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Subject: Re: G4 vs AMD 64 Opteron.

Author: Hristo

Date: 00:59:31 07/29/04

Go up one level in this thread


On July 29, 2004 at 03:32:36, Dan Andersson wrote:

>On July 29, 2004 at 03:20:44, Andreas Guettinger wrote:
>
>>If you only want to play chess with your new box, I would buy the Dual Opteron.
>>For Crafty I remember a single Opteron 2.2Ghz is about 50% faster than a single
>>G5 2Ghz for chess.
>>
>>If you want to do any other things with your new box (i.e. programming), buy the
>>G5.
>>
> Is it the development environment that make you prefer the G5 (IDE, API,
>libraries ...)?

Sorry to jump into this.
But the IDE on the OSX (xCode) is not very good. It is cumbersome and heavy and
ultimately fails in the most frequently used feature; editing text. I swear this
part is preposterous, at this time. It is so bad that I have abandoned sing
XCode (IDE) for editing text and instead use jEdit or SubEthaEdit and then edit
the makefiles by hand. ;-/

The API (Cocoa) is awesome.
It is really strange at first, after using C++ and C for years, to discover an
API and language that are simpler than C++ and yet vastly more flexible than C.
I still prefer C++ though.

The integrated debugger (XCode) is finicky.
First there are bugs in it that cause it to crash and it brings down the entire
IDE, with all of your source code. :-/
Secondly it doesn't traverse variables very well, in my experience, especially
stl stuff.

So I end up using DDD, installed through fink (project that ports applications
from linux to OS X).

On OS X, there is CHUD; a set of tools that can prove invaluable when optimizing
code. Hardware level debugging, including instruction stalls and branch
mis-predictions and other cool details about the execution of your application
and the system as a whole.

> I wonder mainly because the time to compile benchmarks I have
>seen of the Opteron are impressive.

There are some strange things that Apple has done with respect to the
development environment.
For instance there is no dynamic version of the standard C++ library, only
static.

Regards,
Hristo

>
>MvH Dan Andersson
>
>>regards
>>Andy



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