Windows 7 and Snow Leopard: My experiences
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If you're writing in C++, PC-lint[^] is hard to beat for efficiency* - although it's a little tricky to configure at first it has saved my bacon on numerous occasions. * though they can't do web design for toffee - as the their site illustrates all too well. The tool itself is very effective, though. On one memorable occasion it spotted a nasty (actually a name scoping conflict) in production code which caused a behavioural change under certain conditions. After looking at the code in question we predicted the conditions, informed the testers what buttons to press and how it would fail - and shipped them a patch to test after they'd confirmed that the bug was there in the first place. It did everything we predicted - and that bug was only spotted because we ran a static analysis on all 250,000 lines of the code and took the time to carefully analyse the results. Disclaimer: I make my living from PC-lint integration tools these days, so I'm slightly biased I suspect!
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
* though they can't do web design for toffee
This element has no style rules. Gasp!! :laugh:
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This month I installed and used both Snow Leopard and Windows 7. Here are my experiences and impressions: 1. Installation - Windows 7 Fresh install took me about ½ hour and Snow Leopard took about ¾ hour. Windows 7 was a fresh install where as Snow Leopard was an upgrade. Both the installations were smooth and went with minimum hassles. 2. Post Installation - Windows 7 gave me a feeling that something was new, right from startup with that nifty new animation and after startup it looked new in several respects. Snow Leopard looked very much like Leopard after the first startup and I was wondering whether the installation succeeded. Even now since all the applications look the same I don't have that "new" feeling. 3. Application Compatibility - I did not experience any compatibility issues with both the applications. Well almost, I started up a Mac application which I was working on and it crashed at startup. Snow Leopard changed the behavior of a certain framework method that caused the issue. Of course, once I resolved the issue the application worked fine. 4. Performance - Both the operating systems seemed to have improved the performance. Windows 7 much more so as Vista performance was pretty bad. Leopard performance was already good but snow leopard seems to have improved it a little more. 5. Programmer Stuff - Windows 7 has plenty of new stuff for programmers and so does Snow Leopard. In fact, Snow Leopard has stuff such as Grand Central and Open CL that can be termed "big". In Windows 7 I can't think of anything that is "big". Though there are several small things: DirectWrite, Windows Web Services, Sensor API, Ribbon API etc. Snow Leopard offers several similar small new things. One thing about Mac is that the development tools are free and come with the Operating System CD. The IDE XCode was updated with Snow Leopard. That part turned out to be highly exciting for me. XCode has a static code analysis feature which immediately helped me to identify a few memory leaks in an app I was developing. I wish that static code analysis feature that can detect problems was present on VS 2008 ( No, VS 2008 Code Analysis feature is not similar.)
Snow Leopard is worth it for the scrollable stacks, less space used and what apple call "easy text selection" imo. Smooth installation as always, but the most important point is a fair upgrade price. I loved Vista when it came out, and because of C# programming, I use Windows next to Mac (it's that good). But I don't like Windows 7. The UI changes like jumplist make it more cluttered, and I think that the slight color changes means there's less contrast in general. Also not loving the taskbar. I'm not noticing much more performance, less UAC annoyances (btw, rarely got UAC messages from Vista, only for updates and setting changes, similar to the password entry on a mac) and the price for an upgrade is too steep. My verdict: Snow Leopard is worth an update (if you can get it cheap), while I'll be sticking to Vista instead of upgrading to Windows 7.
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Looks pretty good. Expect "Hlp plz" email from me as well if I couldn't get to configure it right. :-O
It is a crappy thing, but it's life -^ Carlo Pallini
Sure - just let me know. :)
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
* though they can't do web design for toffee
This element has no style rules. Gasp!! :laugh:
It certainly doesn't seem to... :doh:
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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The dev tools for Windows are free too. http://www.microsoft.com/express/ Having them on the disc might be nice for a few people, but in general you're better off downloading the tools so you get the latest stuff. I haven't had any real experience with XCode, but several of my friends have, and each of them has said it doesn't hold a candle to Visual Studio. What kind of static code analysis are you looking for? The Microsoft C/C++ compiler includes PreFAST (/analyze switch) which works wonders if you use SAL annotations. For the .NET world there's FxCop. Does that not cover what you're looking for?
I wouldn't call FxCop a static code analyzer. It really does style checking more than anything else. Static code analysis has historically been more targeted at finding things that are compilationally correct, but wrong. For instance a local variable that is never used. With C# some static analysis is done by the compiler (like the case I sighted), but other analysis can still be done. I use a tool called CodeIt.Right that finds cases where not all disposable fields are disposed, or a non-serializable public property exists on a class that is marked serializable. Obviously it does not catch everything. It's a automated code review, looking for things that you likely missed. I find it indespensable. Pat O Mearly Human Programmer.
Tanks for your support
Pat O
Blog_ _ _
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<ooo> <ooo> <ooo> -
This month I installed and used both Snow Leopard and Windows 7. Here are my experiences and impressions: 1. Installation - Windows 7 Fresh install took me about ½ hour and Snow Leopard took about ¾ hour. Windows 7 was a fresh install where as Snow Leopard was an upgrade. Both the installations were smooth and went with minimum hassles. 2. Post Installation - Windows 7 gave me a feeling that something was new, right from startup with that nifty new animation and after startup it looked new in several respects. Snow Leopard looked very much like Leopard after the first startup and I was wondering whether the installation succeeded. Even now since all the applications look the same I don't have that "new" feeling. 3. Application Compatibility - I did not experience any compatibility issues with both the applications. Well almost, I started up a Mac application which I was working on and it crashed at startup. Snow Leopard changed the behavior of a certain framework method that caused the issue. Of course, once I resolved the issue the application worked fine. 4. Performance - Both the operating systems seemed to have improved the performance. Windows 7 much more so as Vista performance was pretty bad. Leopard performance was already good but snow leopard seems to have improved it a little more. 5. Programmer Stuff - Windows 7 has plenty of new stuff for programmers and so does Snow Leopard. In fact, Snow Leopard has stuff such as Grand Central and Open CL that can be termed "big". In Windows 7 I can't think of anything that is "big". Though there are several small things: DirectWrite, Windows Web Services, Sensor API, Ribbon API etc. Snow Leopard offers several similar small new things. One thing about Mac is that the development tools are free and come with the Operating System CD. The IDE XCode was updated with Snow Leopard. That part turned out to be highly exciting for me. XCode has a static code analysis feature which immediately helped me to identify a few memory leaks in an app I was developing. I wish that static code analysis feature that can detect problems was present on VS 2008 ( No, VS 2008 Code Analysis feature is not similar.)
nice review. Windows seven also offers GPU computing usage. http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/partner/archive/2009/08/22/gpu-computing-and-windows-7.aspx[^]
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I wouldn't call FxCop a static code analyzer. It really does style checking more than anything else. Static code analysis has historically been more targeted at finding things that are compilationally correct, but wrong. For instance a local variable that is never used. With C# some static analysis is done by the compiler (like the case I sighted), but other analysis can still be done. I use a tool called CodeIt.Right that finds cases where not all disposable fields are disposed, or a non-serializable public property exists on a class that is marked serializable. Obviously it does not catch everything. It's a automated code review, looking for things that you likely missed. I find it indespensable. Pat O Mearly Human Programmer.
Tanks for your support
Pat O
Blog_ _ _
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Nope, I've run both and they are very similar in their findings. Perhaps if I spent the time to weed through all the naming convention warnings I would find more meat in the output of FxCop. Instead I chose to move on to other tools.
Tanks for your support
Pat O
Blog_ _ _
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<ooo> <ooo> <ooo> -
Nope, I've run both and they are very similar in their findings. Perhaps if I spent the time to weed through all the naming convention warnings I would find more meat in the output of FxCop. Instead I chose to move on to other tools.
Tanks for your support
Pat O
Blog_ _ _
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Thanks I'll try and fix it.
Tanks for your support
Pat O
Blog_ _ _
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