--- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > > I would prefer to use C, since I don't > currently know Tcl, and > > > > I am developing for a fairly low end machine. > > Btw, how low end is this machine exactly? PIII 800MHz 512MB RAM, 40GB IDE drive. > And what > is your > application doign? > The portion that's going on this type of machine will be taking file uploads along with an authorization ticket to deter unauthorized uploads. It also serves the files as static content. Since the goal is to keep costs as low as possible, I would like to make sure that I'm limited by the bandwidth available to the machine, not the hardware. In order to do that, I want to do as little disk I/O as possible, and keep the CPU usage minimized, as well. Since the application on this end is super simple, and requires C APIs such as mkstemps(3) and MD5(3) I would find it easier to just write a small amount of C and be sure that the machine isn't doing more work than it needs to. > > > IMNSHO that is an incredibly bad reason to use > C, especially with > > > AOLserver, and especially if you plan to write > code using > > > AOLserver on an ongoing basis. > > > > Is this because you have a bad impression of C, or > because it > > AOLserver doesn't work well with C? > > Neither. Writing new C code for AOLserver works > quite well, in large > part because of all the existing nice C APIs. > (Indeed, I'd hate to do > multi-threaded C programming solely with the POSIX > thread APIs. What > AOLserver gives you is built on POSIX threads > underneath, but much > nicer.) > > But there's a reason Jim D. and the other AOLserver > guys integrated a > high level, powerful, simple, and easy to learn > scripting language > very early on in AOLserver. Tcl is there in > AOLserver because it's > makes development vastly more productive than coding > in C alone. Perhaps. If I'm writing an application that will take me two days to code and debug in C, and I know it's efficient, I'm happy. If I take the time to learn Tcl, then I have to take it on faith that it'll be fast enough. Over the last 25 years I've been professionally coding, I've seen various interpreted languages touted for their speed, such as Forth, Perl, Java, etc., but I always find the speed claims to be inflated. Knowing how interpeters work, I know there's going to be a penalty to using an interpreter. There's the obvious fact that the commands have to be interpreted, but it's also typically true that strings are copied around quite a bit, which can be avoided with careful C coding. If my uploaded file can be read into memory from the socket, and then written to a file without needing any excess copying, then that saves my CPU cycles and caches. > There are many good reasons to use C with AOLserver, > but "I don't want > to bother to learn any Tcl at all." is not one of > them. > Quotation marks should mean you are quoting someone. That statement is not what I said, or meant. I am willing to learn Tcl if there's a need, but I don't perceive a need to do that at this point. On another tangent, my web searching indicates that it's possible to keep AOLserver from starting up a Tcl interpreter for each thread, but the method was not described. If this were done, would the multipart/form-data still be parsed? Thanks, Fred __________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Get on-the-go sports scores, stock quotes, news and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/mobile.html -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
