Executables

[Brandlingill]

Hi.

Before stumbling on this forum and Aurora I was looking at PureBasic because of being impressed by what it said about producing very fast and small executables. The only programming experience I had was using VB as a hobby a few years ago so it sounded great. I have been playing around with Aurora all day and on first impression it seems to produce fast executables that are perhaps not as small as PB's, but still quite small anyway. If this is the case then would it be an idea to add things like this to the list of features already being promoted?

Just a thought ...

[Kale]

I think it would be advantageous to promote Aurora's ability to create small standalone exe's in light of today's massive runtimes required by other compilers.

[Zen]

Kale... You mean like .Net?? And many many other languages.

Aurora is great in the fact that considering that the excutables need no run-time libraries, its no interpreted, its pure maching code and the size is amazingly small given the power it posseses! Also its very soon to be cross platform

Lewis

[Parker]

.NET, Java, many BASICs, even MS C++ all need runtimes

[Barney]

I will never understand why people hate runtimes so much. Once they are on your machine there's no need to download them or install them again. Once that is out of the way one can forget about the runtimes and concentrate on the applications which can be small, 'cause the runtimes we already have. I see .NET just as a giant bag packed with goodies I can use in my applications. Regarding the client side of business I have yet to meet a client, which did not have .NET already installed. So, what's all the fuss about? 

Barney

[Kale]

I will never understand why people hate runtimes so much. Once they are on your machine there's no need to download them or install them again. Once that is out of the way one can forget about the runtimes and concentrate on the applications which can be small, 'cause the runtimes we already have. I see .NET just as a giant bag packed with goodies I can use in my applications. Regarding the client side of business I have yet to meet a client, which did not have .NET already installed. So, what's all the fuss about?ÂÃ, 

Barney

I always fear (although i may be wrong) that a kind of 'DLL hell' could occur with runtimes. Say for example you install runtime v1 and busily created programs using it. Then a bug is found in the runtime and 'fixed' by the vendor so you know have runtime v2 installed. Now when you run your original program coded using the first runtime it fails because of incompatibilities of the newly installed v2 runtime. I always think about this and always have an innate fear of relying on things not under your control to never change.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_hell

[Zen]

Hmm well i guess i share similar views as Kale here. But yes runtimes i guess are usefull, like .Net, however I personally would class it as something more like Java than a simple runtime. I love the idea of having cross language data types and how simple it is to create things in it, and also yes have the very small applications. There are a lot of good points i like about .Net and hats off to them, they've done well with it! But i still prefer the Win32 style of programming much better, it seems to give me a much bigger sense of achievement and quite a lot of the time i like the problem solving side of things.

Lewis

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Standardized runtimes are fine.  Like the C runtime library since it exists on every single Windows and Linux system out there.  Specialized runtimes can cause problems as I have discussed before.

I still don't have .NET on my machine, don't have a need for it.

[J B Wood (Zumwalt)]

*scratches head*
Ok, here is the bottom line on .Net

Its Microsofts way of selling a 'scripting language' and calling it a 'programming language'
You REQUIRE the framework and its compilers when you ironically buy Visual Studio.
What is VS.Net???

Simple, its an editor, nothing more.
You code in a massively complex editor, same crap you can do in notepad.
All the editor does is allow you to keep things tidy.

I have written a complete enterprise application using notepad and compiled it at the command prompt using CSC.
It all has the same core problem.
ISLM

Basically anything you write in .Net goes through an intermediate assembler and made into an exe that windows understands, it can be decompiled with the same assembler unless obfuscated.

Ya, someone can take you application, with the core framework tools, and dissasemble it to its base code and see how you wrote it.
Its that simple.

Did I mention the person who dissasembled it didn't have to pay for anything because Microsoft gives that tool away for free?
Its free with the Framework.

I could go on about this but its pointless for me to, I use there software, write in all there languages, but hate it.

[Zen]

I found a program on the net the other day that actually compiles .Net applications to full executables, with no need to have the .Net framework on the target machine. And it works too, i fresh installed 2K on a partition and ran the program, worked fine. Although the executable was about 20mb, i think all this thing did was embed the .Net framework libraries required to make the application run. Still i guess its quite good in some ways, as it does obsufocate the code too.

Lewis

[kryton9]

I have mixed feelings about the way all the major languages have gone. I can see why they are doing what they are doing, but on the otherhand what Kale mentioned is a real worry for me too.

It just seems that they should do what Borland sort of could have done, which is offer .net compliant and win32 compliant versions. But to have to install .net anyways and all the other crap when all you want to do is make win32 type pograms, just makes no sense to me.

I installed MS Visual C++ last night, by default win32 type applications are disabled. Just so strange that they would do that. You have to go in and comment out 4 lines, why in the world would they just not leave that be a viable application type be default boggles my mind.

Thank goodness for Aurora. It is like a breathe of fresh air after being in a valley of smog. I just wish Paul had a few clones to help him and we could have the finished language now

[Parker]

The .NET SDK ships with a program called ngen, which creates a native windows executable. I didn't think it bound the runtime to that program, I thought it was just like compiling a C++ program (well, with garbage collection and whatever other libraries you are using).

[Shannara]

Almost, Ngen doesnt compile to pure stand-alone machine code, it still requires the massive runtime libraries.

[Parker]

Oh