Why PowerBasic ?

[Chris Boss]

Here is a must see video, Herb Sutter (Microsoft C++ expert) giving a talke entitled "why C++ ?"


This talk has some very important points about performance in software and native coding. As you watch the video simply replace every reference to C++ to PowerBasic in your mind and I think you will understand the value of his talk.

[Chris Boss]

So why is this talk so valuable ?

The key point here is how today there are many computing devices with have minimal hardware resources (aka. tablets, etc.) or some software needs to be run on data servers and the load on such servers is being overloaded, so performance is vital. There is no better performance than native code on a platform, which is why he touts C++. The same could be said about PowerBasic, a Windows native code compiler. He also comments about the weaknesses in managed code (aka. dot.net) and how it has not lived up to its hopes as a "do all" style of coding and performance is one area which this shows up. Not my words, but his. Interesting info about how Windows Vista was an experiment in trying to do everything with managed code and it was a failure because of this (this explains why Vista was poor in performance).

I have linked to this video in a number of my blog articles which have been posted on CodeProject and it gets the most positive comments from developers of anything I link to in those articles.