If the airliner has to transform to Robot Mode to make this work, I can foresee a lot of problems.

Is that because you don't like Compellent, or don't like Dell? (I don't work for either of these companies ...)

Unfortunately I've had the opposite experience. Wine mostly works, and it's amazing it works as well as it does, but something is always broken just enough to make things suck.

In my case, I tried the Portal demo recently, and had random freezes every 10 sec or so that made the game unplayable. (Plus insanely slow startup on a system equipped w/an SSD, but I could deal with that.)

I was looking forward to trying a Linux version of the demo so I could buy the game if it worked. Oh well, too bad for me.

Going offtopic, but another good thing about CISC is that you can optimize such that the most common instructions have the shortest instruction lengths possible. This slightly reduces the disc space and memory used by programs.

Not to distract from the topic at hand, but you do not appear to be familiar with the rich history of Louisiana politics. Try googling "Louisiana political corruption". (some of the links do say they've been getting sick of it post-Katrina.)

One of the good things about living in Texas is that it is always acceptable to hold the door open for anybody, and more generally than that, it's never impolite to be polite.

The assailant apparently claims he was being harassed constantly. In that case, I would expect a small-dick accusation regardless of the actual size of the package. (well, unless he was hung like a horse)

Thanks for the thoughtful and comprehensive reply.

I realize and understand that C99 is not a C++ standard and that VC++'s priority is C++ support. Of course, my priorities are different. I shouldn't claim that VC++ is bad for everybody, but it is bad for me.

Speaking of VLAs specifically, they have been broken in GCC until very recently

It is true VLAs are/were 'broken' in GCC in the sense that they are not fully C99 conformant. That has been documented in the info pages for a long time. However, speaking practically, for the simple declarations I have used, I have never had a problem. Perhaps I ought to double-check that :P

it's simply non-portable in practice

I agree that non-portability across compilers would be a problem, except that of course GCC itself is so incredibly portable, and is also the preferred compiler on many non-Windows platforms.

FWIW, I am not a C99 stickler -- I only care about the parts of it that I use, and I specifically don't worry about free-form variable declarations because there is an easy fix -- declare your variables only after a block begins.

VLAs have no "easy fix" -- the closest alternative is alloca(), which my manpage claims is "buggy" on many unspecified systems, and of course, it's not really portable or standard either. Using malloc() is slower, uglier (since if you're doing it right you'll want to check the return value), and has the potential to fragment your memory.

I apologize if these points have already been debated to death in the flamewars -- I don't read that group. I also expect you are already aware of these points and were simply trying to make yours, in which case, this was a superfluous post. Oh well :P

VC++ doesn't support variable-length arrays. IOW it pukes on

void foobar(int i) { int myarray[i]; }

Variable-length arrays are part of the C99 standard. That's 10 years old at this point and it's a pattern I employ often. I am unsure of the status of this in VC++ 2010 (coming Real Soon) but last I heard, it still wasn't in.

Agreed. In addition, since I have fairly addictive personality and enough addictions already ... I don't need to start an MMORPG habit.

I don't understand this. It's true Linux does not have kqueue. (as I recall Linus thought it was "ugly" ... whatever) But in theory (because I haven't actually used them), to achieve the same effect under Linux, you would use timerfd() + signalfd() + (your normal i/o fds like sockets etc.) ... and then epoll_wait()/poll()/select() on all of the fds you were interested in. In this way, one thread could wait for multiple different types of events, including timers and signals.

Would you please point out the flaws w/the above that make it impossible or impractical to achieve the functionality needed by Grand Dispatch? I would be enlightened -- thanks in advance.

I did run iBCS, and while it seemed to work well for what it did, it is not a panacea for everything.

For example, anything that was dynamically linked would still have dependencies on the original system libraries. So you get to copy all those over, worry about licensing issues (if you're trying to redistribute, anyway), and hope something didn't break on the way. In my experience, a c++ widget-generating app we were trying to run encountered both of those roadblocks, and we determined it was better to go another route -- java, hah!

You can lend friends money. Just not money you would mind losing. It's like gambling basically.

Side note: I once loaned a small amount of money to an annoying "friend" who then apparently fell off the face of the earth. It was worth the money. Although I suppose I could have achieved the same effect by just being a d*ck about his sob story, but that eats at your conscience a little more.

Point taken, assuming it has to be fast and there is that much critical code.

Well, it doesn't dispatch them :-) from what I read in the documents, all it might do now is common subexpression elimination.

The first time I saw the "brain" scene ...

I was eating vermicelli at a Vietnamese restaurant, with a bunch of kids running around the tables, and Hannibal was playing (muted) on their big screen TV.

:-( I don't recommend that.