Pretty much the same for me.

I tried to use Postgrest 2 years ago, but I could not get it to compile into a custom directory and decided that it's not worth the effort.

In the meantime I have written so many wrappers geared to MySQL that I will use it for many years to come. But I will certainly give Postgrest a try sometime in the future.

It's always the same. The realists come with real issues, real arguments and real examples.

The Microsoft apologists only say that it's "pretty damn good". That's it. No specifics, no reasons, no nothing. It's just that good, "honestly".

(un)paid advertizement:

I love to dump on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but honestly SQL Sever 2000 on is pretty damn good.

Now, if SQL server is "honestly" so good, why are the one million busiest sites slowly migrating away from Microsoft?

http://news.netcraft.com/archi...

In 2008, 20% of the million busiest websites used Microsoft, now only 12% do, and the decline slowly continues.

When we talk about these installations, we talk about very heavy loads, very much data and very high requirements on reliability and availability.

So why does the high-end "enterprise" systems move away from that "pretty damn good" platform? The Microsoft apologists on this thread constantly tell me who licensing costs don't matter and how good all Microsoft products are ("honestly"!) - but exactly in the one area where licensing costs really don't matter (the one million busiest sites) Microsoft is also losing it. So why then?

Maybe it's not as "pretty damn good" as some anonymous internet commentators claim? Honestly?

Exactly. My hoster even charges extra for the privilege to run Windows. (Here in continental Europe, Windows is used on less than 10% of servers) - which makes MS SQL a "no go" for most installations.

In fact I would not even consider a database that runs only on a proprietary platform.

3: Finding MS SQL expertise is easy.

That's a lie - and you know it. Everybody (and their dogs) runs MySQL. Wordpress uses MySQL. Pretty much everybody in the computing industry who is working with databases (except maybe some Microsoft-diehards who refuse to run anything not from Redmond out of principle) has at least some MySQL experience.

If you're doing something that data intensive and can't afford a DB license, then you're doing something wrong.

The sheer stupidity in that statement is outrageous. You may not believe it, but it's not just Fortune 500 companies that do "data intensive" stuff. Even a freelancer (i.e. a single person) is able to do "data intensive" stuff.

So, whether you can "afford" a DB license depends on the application. There are lots of applications where using DB would price you right out of the market.

Don't you feel any shame?

It's trivial to expose your lies, it's even on Wikipedia:

Recently, gang-related incidents have been on the rise. Between the years of 1997 and 2005 over 300 gang-related deaths have occurred. [..] In late September 2005, Toronto police arrested 44 members of the Rexdale-based "Ardwick Blood Crew" also known as A.B.C.

Hmm, also according to Wikipedia, "Rexdale's first residents were mostly English and Scottish, but evolved into a multicultural neighbourhood in the following decades."

But there is more:

Then in May 2006, 106 additional gang members were apprehended, who were part of Rexdale's "Jamestown Crew" (a Crip gang), in the largest gang sweep in Toronto's history.

Hmm, what ethnicity could a gang be that is called "Jamestown Crew"?.... Hmmm, you will probably never know...

In June 2007, Toronto police arrested about 95 people, including leaders of the Jane and Finch-based "Driftwood Crips" and the sister of murder victim Jordan Manners, for a lengthy list of 700 criminal charges.

Aha, a "Crips" franchise gang. What ethnicity could that be... It's a mystery...

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

That's not true at all.

Washington DC has a couple of black neighborhoods that are rich and violent.

Often compared to what exactly?

Because blacks commit more violent crime than all other races combined, one can say: Compared to everything else.

Blacks genocided Khoi-San in Angola, Mosambique, etc. - now all violent deaths are black there.
Blacks genocided (almost all) Pigmies in Kongo - now (almost all) violent deaths are black there.
Blacks genocided Indians in Uganda - now all violent deaths are black there.
Blacks ethnically cleansed Whites in Detroit - now (almost) all violent deaths are black there.

It's only "racist" when whites are doing it.

If blacks are doing it, it is "empowerment".

The sad thing is that Mozilla hides their ESR release. Once I (unsuccessfully) tried to find it on mozilla.org (Go ahead, try it!).

I only succeeded by using Google (oh, the irony!) to find an obscure download page on mozilla.org.

Mozilla treats their ESR release like some unwanted stepchild.

Another point:

The preprocessor-haters always only offer theoretical arguments ("it supports conditional compilation!") but they never post real code.

Why?

Very simple:

First, even they have a hard time to learn C++ templates and all the other highly complicated replacements.

Second, even when you know about it, using templates is pretty hard actual work. You don't do that kind of work for a posting in a discussion-forum.

Third, when you do the work and compare all that highly sophisticated template-code with the preprocessor-stuff it is supposed to replace, you will realize that just using the preprocessor is so much easier that it is almost comical.

You only offer emotional arguments ("a blight", "relic from the past", etc.).

Yes, the preprocessor does not work at the same level as the compiler - and that is the good thing about it because it gives you leverage about what the compiler sees and it allows you to guarantee that the logic outside the #ifdefs is untouched by any changes - therefore you get much higher quality/stability.

Your example with the untested feature can be solved by isolating the crazy untested code in its own module, and simply *not enabling that module in the build scripts*.

So you have to have modules for every tiny feature?

And all that bloat and overhead just to satisfy your emotional sense of aesthetics?

So to avoid 2 lines of "ugly" code (#ifdef / #endif) you need to create a module, adapt the build-system, etc. etc.?

And we have not even gone into some "advanced" stuff like

#if defined(TEST_1) && defined(TEST_2)

So easy to do with the preprocessor - how do you do that with modules? Create a third module that contains just the code that is needed when both other modules are included? And hide everything in the build-system so that nobody can find and/or debug it?

And again, why all that overhead when all you get is a program that is slower, uses more RAM and (yes!) is much more difficult to understand and debug?

Ideally, the buld-system should not contain any logic. All the logic should be in the source-code.

And of course your "aesthetics before function" - approach may be acceptable on the PC where all that bloat does not matter much. But it is a absolute no-go in embedded-systems programming. Just two years ago I have worked in a project where we had only 128 KB (yes, that is kilobytes) of RAM. And we had to frequently cut the bloat to stay under that limit.

In that situation you forget about "modules", object-orientation and all that other buzz-words from the ivory-tower pretty fast.

So what do you do when you have a new revision of a circuit board that has a different pin-layout?

Do you throw away everything (several man-months of programming and testing) and create a sophisticated module-system that will create numerous other problems and limitations to satisfy aesthetics?

No: You use the preprocessor to add the new stuff while still avoiding any change for the old, so the old stuff can still be used and tested and (more importantly) you can compare the old with the new.

D supports conditional compilation [dlang.org]. And has features to accomplish any other sane use of the preprocessor, but in a cleaner way as first class language constructs.

As I explained to the other guy, it does not help against syntax errors. It does not allow for strict separation of features.

Yeah, but should you? That's basically writing code in a feature-poor unstructured string manipulation meta-language.

I certainly agree that the C-preprocessor is a poor language. But the problem lies in the lack of features of the preprocessor, not the fact that it is a preprocessor.

So yes, it is a poor language - but that is still better than no preprocessor at all.