Cross platform: How they do it?

[Alma J Wetzker]

Andrew L. Gould wrote:

[snip]
> I have a question for the programmers on the list:  It's my understanding that 
> Perl, Python and Java (and Ruby?) manage memory allocation for the 
> programmer.  Does this impact the programmers' ability to control the 
> efficiency of the application?

The age old trade-off between program efficiency and programmer efficiency. 
As a programmer, every platform specific detail you don't need to worry about 
gives you more time to work on the actual problem.  It can cost you in user 
run time on a specific platform.  In reality, where we live, a programmer who 
can do good platform specific things like memory management and i/o AND good 
application things, is VERY rare.  Rarer still is one who can work across 
platforms and still do applications.

In practice, spending time refining algorithms give order of magnitude changes 
in performance (>> 10x) where tweaking code gives a few percentage points (<< 
1x)

The best languages provide ways to touch the low level stuff if you want to. 
The best programmers use those tools.  The efficiency lost is seldom worth 
losing sleep over.

     -- Alma