3 ms·
I worked at the company which used a proprietary compiler, IDE including debugger.. It was few thousands $ I believe. plus about the same amount for their propr
by theamk 3y ago
I worked at the company which used a proprietary compiler, IDE including debugger.. It was few thousands $ I believe. plus about the same amount for their proprietary JTAG adapter.
Worst software I ever used. Crashy, slow, critical features missing (example: debugger can show thread list... but not the stacks of other threads).
So no, I would not expect expensive commercial software to be better. It might generate 2% faster code or be certified, but the day to day experience would be terrible.
- jeffrallen 3y agoLeonard's Law: Software will be as bad as it's users can tolerate, and no worse. VHDL compilers are catastrophically bad, because electrical engineers have to tolerate them and make tape-out. FADECs don't normally crash airplanes because pilots don't like when that happens.
- qchris 3y agoIs there an article/primary source on this that you can point up? I spent a few minutes searching but couldn't seem to find anything.
- jeffrallen 3y agoIt's next to Neves' Law ("The harder a bug is to find, the smaller the diff to fix it will be.") in the deleted list in Wikipedia. They both were discovered by former colleagues of mine. And named by me.
- qchris 3y agoThank you!
- MichaelZuo 3y agoBut at least the vendor would guarantee, in writing, some minimum baseline of performance?
- pavel_lishin 3y agoYes! And if you're willing to spend tens of thousands of more dollars in court, not to mention the months litigation may take, you may even get that minimum baseline (at the expense of other features or bug fixes that don't fall under the written contract) after another 18 months of development time.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoObviously one should buy from trustworthy businesses, that wouldn't drag their customers into court for every deviation. I'm sure there are shady vendors of high end software products, but at those price ranges there's no reason to choose them over established names.
- theamk 3y agoAt most, it would be something like "our examples work, and we can provide support". I've never seen things like "IDE does not crash" written into contracts.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago"Our examples are guaranteed to work (99.9%+ of the time...) on X configuration(s) in Y environmental conditions with Z functions." Is a pretty normal expectation when your paying thousands or tens of thousands per month per seat. If you've literally never seen a guarantee like that and your company is actually paying that much money for a product, then it would be wise to shop around.
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoHa ha. Oh boy.