Chris, ----- Alkuperäinen viesti ----- Lähettäjä: "Chris Nolan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vastaanottaja: "Heikki Tuuri" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kopio: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Lähetetty: Monday, February 16, 2004 1:56 PM Aihe: Re: InnoDB Hot Backup + MySQL embedded?
> Heikki, > > Thank you greatly for answering my questions. Your obvious dedication to > the open source world and high-quality of software cannot be > understated. thank you :). > Upon reading some of the InnoDB source code, I've noticed that C seems > to be your language of choice. That said, it seems more and more of the > literature that is promoted around my university emphasises testing > methods related to OO languages like Java and C++ or looking at > different programming paradigms such as logical programming (my > university formally trains all students in Prolog and optionally > Mercury) and functional programming (Our very first CS subject involves > Haskell programming! It used to involve Miranda). Is there anything in > the way of strategies that you would recommend to developers (I'm > working on a MySQL/InnoDB based server app at the moment. Anyone else > who reads this message please hit me with your 2c) regarding C > programming and testing (they drill C into us with great rigor at the > university I attend, but after second year it boils down to assignment > submissions and that's about it)? C versus object-oriented lanuguages like C++/Java is a topic I have discussed a lot with programmers. I believe that traditional procedural approaches and languages, like C, are the best for 'systems programming', by which I mean implementing anything with complex data structures and lots of parallelism. A DBMS is a typical example of such a complex program. My opinion is based on: 1) The object-oriented paradigm recommends that algorithms are structured around 'objects', that is, around data structures. But I think it is easier for humans to understand complex algorithms, like the splitting of a node in a B-tree, if the algorithms are presented on their own terms, and not fragmented around the 'objects' involved. Donald Knuth of the Stanford University remarked that proving the correctness of an 'object-oriented' algorithm is hard, because keeping track of autonomous 'objects' is difficult. 2) C++ encourages programmers to use 'implicit' operations. In C++ functions can have the same name, even though they take a different number of parameters, and the data type of the parameters can differ. There can be implicit constructor and destructor operations for objects. I believe that the use implicit operations is prone to bugs, and makes a program harder to read. 3) A weakness of C compared to Java is memory management. In C you can easily write programs that leak memory or run over allocated buffers. In practice, it has turned out to be relatively easy to keep these memory management bugs at a tolerable level in our C programs, so that a move to a language with automatic memory management is not needed. In all programming languages I think the following are important programming conventions: 1) Remove redundancy from your code. Analogous to 'normalizing' your relational database. 2) Use a lot of comments. 3) Use a lot of assertions, which capture bugs early on. > The reason that I ask is that you have managed to create the world's > fastest transactional database handler that runs on such a large number > of different architectures and operating systems. Also, the fact that > you've taken everything that Oracle tout as making them brilliant and > doing it many times better than they have displays your commitment and > incredible set of skills. I must say that I have never before heard such praise in software world :). Often it is just the opposite. The Usenet is full of threads saturated with bashing and name-calling. > I hope that one day that the software I am currently building will also > contribute to both the commercial software world and the open source > community. The fact that you've achieved this with such success and that > you post to the MySQL mailing list so often is why I ask you these > questions. > > Regards, > > Chris Best regards Heikki -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
