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| In University, we coined a universal reply to all questions relating to the behaviour, or mis-behaviour, of our software. Whenever anyone asked why we'd implemented a particular feature in a particular way, we put it down to "Arbitrary Microsoft design decisions". Since then, the "Arbitrary Microsoft design decision" has come to be the accepted explanation of any crash, bug, or program behaviour that seems to "just happen" for no apparent reason. Judging by Brian (code-god at id Software) Hook's .plan file, he's experiencing the same arbitrary Microsoft design decisions - October 9, 1997 ------------------ I do not comprehend Microsoft's inability to write software that just works. Here is the latest in my epic saga of "How to Write Software When Your Tools are Written By Complete Idiots". The sad part is that I know a lot of really competent and smart people at Microsoft, yet I guess their code never makes it into production software. Or something like that. So why am I griping? Dig upon this scenario: Given two identical machines (Intergraph Realizm workstations, identical driver sets, both dual PPro/200s and 128MB of RAM, both running WinNT 4 with SP3), and given two IDENTICAL installations of MSVC 5 (w/ SP2), and given that both grab an ENTIRE directory of source code (including all relevant project and workspace files) from a central directory, and both do complete rebuilds without touching any compiler options, given ALL this, WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD THEY GENERATE DIFFERENT EXECUTABLES? Different sizes, and in many cases different behaviour. If I build Quake2 on my machine using the "release build", the DLLs and EXEs generated work just fine. If either Cash or Carmack do the same thing, they get fucked up, bizarre shit like weird spinning worlds and other randomly bizarre stuff. Did I mention this is with the same basic hardware on everyone's machine? And the same OS? And the same compiler? And the same project file? And the same workspace files? Cash went so far as to format his hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch, and he's getting the same problems. Where are these magic compiler options being stored -- in the Flash BIOS?! Or maybe I have magic compiler options being stored in my registry... and in that case, well, civilization is doomed and we may as well start building fires with rocks again. It's like the programmers at Microsoft have neither pride nor common sense. All right, I'll shut up now, since if I say how I REALLY feel I'll probably piss off even more people. |
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