gilbertd at bio.indiana.edu (Don Gilbert) writes:
>I would like to hear from biocomputing managers and server
>maintainers and others who use sequence glue tools like readseq and
>need to compile from scratch. Do you have concerns about C++
>as a portable source?
Yes, I do have concerns about C++ portability, even on one machine over time.
A lot of this is due to the "standard" libraries, which seemed to keep
changing. I got very sick of programs having a half life of about a year
due to the iostreams changing. But perhaps C++ is past that now? It
doesn't sound like it from what I have heard from other C++ discussions.
I think that Java is a good idea, and I agree many tasks do not care
overly about speed.
However, C has a huge advantage over Java, and to a lesser degree C++
in terms of interfacing with other tools. I mainly program, for instance,
in a beautiful language called o'caml. It has a C language interface, which
can be kludged into a C++ interface, but not really into a Java interface.
Many other languages have C interfaces, but poor interfacing with other
languages. In this sense, C is more portable.
Hope this is useful,
Andrew.
