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The best place to develop code?

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on June 25, 2008 at 7:57 am

(I'm attending the OpenSolaris Developer Conference, OSdevCon in Prague this week. Periodically I will try to live blog where I can about some of the talks I hear.

What is the most ideal platform to use for development? I attended a "tutorial" on this subject, which really turned into a mini-conference really on C++ development.

• The first talk was given by Roman Shaposhnik on Solaris and Sun Studio and how he thinks this makes for a perfect development environment. Much of his talk went through the rich suite of tools available for the developer – DTrace, D-Light for visualizing counters and microstate accounting, mdb and kmdb and dbx for debugging, and all of the *stat tools.
• Adriaan de Groot from the KDE project stood up then. Apparently Sun Studio uses an older C++ standard library, which makes it less interesting, but when this library was updated, Studio now became very interesting from a C++ purity standpoint. In fact, Studio will complain about things that gcc doesn't, and if you clean these things up you get much cleaner code. And since Studio generates both Linux and Solaris code, it becomes a nice development environment. It has taken many months to clean up these coding issues. The bottom line is that KDE4 is being developed on Sun Studio because you get better quality C++ code.
• Dennis was up next from a company called tBricks, which does algorithmic code targeted at the financial market. They use both Linux and Solaris for their server backend.

Dennis had some really interesting comments on developing on Solaris:

• He finds that build times are 2x faster on Linux than on Solaris on similar hardware. Hmmm … probably bears further analysis. (I suspect that since they are running the build over NFS that the problem is with the e1000g driver.)
• Solaris is a lot more stable for them than Linux, so it doesn't matter if it's slower
• None of their developers use Solaris on the desktop.
• They love using DTrace for tracking down customer problems. They even have customers collect data off of live running systems. But Dennis had some good comments about some things which he would like to see in DTrace.
• Dennis talked about libUmem in Solaris, which he really likes, vs. using leaks in MacOS and valgrind in Linux.
• Stable scheduler on Solaris which over multiple weeks shows more stability

So they deploy on Solaris but they develop on Linux mostly due to the build speed issue, though a few develop on Mac OS and their desktop client is being developed on Windows.

In retrospect, this would have been a good venue to introduce TBB to the audience!

Categories: Open Source

Comments (2)

June 25, 2008 9:20 PM PDT EdwardOCallaghan

I hope Intel keeps OpenSolaris as a first class OS in terms of driver support, and that, drivers such as the e1000g and introducing 802.11n support continue to be maintained and developed at a rapid pace, Thanks.

June 30, 2008 9:12 AM PDT Vijay Tatkar

Nice post, Dave. Good observations and a nice writeup and a lot of it jives with what we see as well. I am going to ask Roman to follow up on the compile time comments observation. I suspect its more gcc/Linux vs. SunStudio/Solaris than Linux v Solaris. Which generally boils down to the magic of "what compile options were used". At higher opt levels, we do a lot of analysis to deliver better performance, but still its worth chasing down. Good observation about TBB. I hope it gets more airtime this year on Solaris. Keep up the good work of blogging about Solaris; I enjoy reading these posts

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