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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, software development on Unix was so natural and enjoyable, even today half the time building a Linux library or app is typically spent in byzantine shell scripts trying to determine which particular occult incantation of incompatible or broken Unix you are not running and throwing various test programs at your compiler that last made sense in 1995.

The true essence of delightful and plain right software development must be over in OpenBSD land, where they run the one and only gcc 4.2.1

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I tend to fall into I use what-ever gets the job done. Though most of the times I did hear from high Microsoft Programmers they first started with Unix/Linux and super productive in that environment. Though when it came to shipping product and getting customers to buy it all the users where on Microsoft/Apple at the time. Tending to wanting to survive and buy `nice` things they all had to learn Microsoft/Visual Studio to ship product to make monies.

Not wanting to fall into a debate about Microsoft/Linux/Apple I've tended to find that Microsoft with all its problems do have very helpful and useful technical support when you run into a major door stop when shipping a product. What they do for backwards compatibility is amazing and still something I would like in the Linux world.

Here I go again....

One of my pet peves with Linux/Unix world is `Still` after all these years their asynchronous IO is still crap compared to Free BSD. Something that after all these years its still amazing that it still isn't fixed. The whole container/virtual machine is required in the Linux world because `Some` essential tool you need is no longer works with your specific version of Linux. To make matters worse I've seen 2-3 virtual machines in enterprise environments that are just simply there to run old software that it vital for the business.

To address that last paragraph, I don't believe it is anything special about Linux. I know a business that still keeps a small army of Windows 2000 servers in virtual machines due to software that simply won't run in any newer version (not even Windows 2003, despite being the last NT 5.x, it's just incompatible enough).

We've had bad experiences mixing Office 32bit vs 64bit applications. Also with Microsoft Windows Server 2000 just double check the license agreement and software licenses some of them have caveats of running the software within a Virtual Machine.

I know Oracle licenses we had to have a dedicated machine because they charge per core/thread.

>The true essence of delightful and plain right software development must be over in OpenBSD land, where they run the one and only gcc 4.2.1

Clang actually.

That's what it says in the marketing material, then you look inside and there it is, the ancient gcc the guys with the claim on most free license can't update because of it's .. licensing.

If it was only an exercise in self-flagellation, sure whatever, but no, their tears flow upstream when stuff 99% of the population uses on Linux inevitably breaks with their bastardized gcc.

(This is very obvious if you consider that no, they don't have an LLVM backend for the alpha)

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