TDD only works in conjunction with thorough peer reviews. Case in point: at my place of work, code and tests written by an intern can go through literally dozens of iterations before the check-in gets authorized, and even the senior engineers are not exempt from peer reviews (recent interns are especially eager to volunteer).
> if doing GPL stuff use the open source license from ExcelsiorJET.
Thanks for mentioning our product, but I have to make a few corrections:
First, the Excelsior JET Runtime license is sadly not GPL-compatible. Also, you cannot use it to target embedded systems, unless you buy Excelsior JET Embedded and pay royalties, though we are currently weighing the option to switch to OpenJDK to eliminate the latter.
Second, the Standard Edition is free even for commercial use (the above limitations apply).
Finally, other editions are available at no cost for use in public non-commercial projects. It does not matter whether the (software part of the) project is open source or not.
Problem is, the God Folder dates back to Vista and it is the Windows 10 Creators Update that began setting that field to NULL. Apparently the author of that change did not foresee any backward compatibility issues.
See my other comment for the details, I believe now that the field was actually not set to null, the returned structure has a union which is documented to be able to be of different types. It's surely the type STRRET_CSTR that wasn't covered by Java, the API is then valid before and after the update, returning the structure with STRRET_CSTR and zeroes in the union is valid.
The main difference however is that a binary produced by Oracle AOT is to a big extent just a pre-populated HotSpot cache, whereas Excelsior JET has been AOT-centric since day one. In practice that means that with Oracle AOT you have to ship both the native binary and the original class files to your customers, and with Excelsior JET you only ship the native binary, which makes reverse engineering your application more difficult.
I recall us being quite surprised when a customer survey had shown that IP protection is more important than application performance for many of our customers, even though it was just a byproduct of our optimization efforts.
Author here. Kindly (suggest where to) cross-post - I think it's important for the health of our industry that freeware authors and open source enthusiasts keep getting rewarded for their efforts. Thank you.
Some info for those that want to AOT Java without paying for it:
The entry-level edition of Excelsior JET is free (as in beer) since the end of August 2016. Licenses for the more senior editions have been available for non-commercial use at no cost for many years.
Low/zero cost is a benefit only if everything else is equal. Eclipse and Netbeans are free, yet people pay for IntelliJ IDEA. We use an expensive commercial GUI testing product because all the free and cheaper alternatives sucked big time, and support was either poor or non-existent.
I am with a small company focused on compilers and managed runtimes (JVM), and I can tell you that _good_ compiler consultants are in high demand. For instance, I had a discussion with a CEO of such specialized consultancy looking for GCC specialists last year, and he said that LLVM engineers are even harder to come by.
I also see processor startups popping up all the time that need compiler/tools engineers badly.
Overall, I'd repeat what others have said: "save a lot and invest your savings wisely."
Can you specify what do you mean with "_good_ compiler consultants"? It doesn't look like the guy who tunes the configuration of the runtimes right? Perhaps someone that writes and modifies the source of a compiler for a special set-up?
I mean someone who can build support for your shiny new language and/or instruction set into GCC or LLVM and get their pull request accepted by the maintainers.
Just want to make one thing clear: in this particular case the request was to block a specific URI. It is the (smaller) ISPs that do not have a technology to block an URI and the (bigger) ISPs that do not bother to employ that tech who block entire sites by IP addresses.
