Lipstick on a Pig: An Object-oriented Layer on an OS That's Not

s programming languages have evolved over the years, the challenges in optimizing and fine-tuning applications have changed. I began programming 20 years ago and quickly adopted assembler language for its fast performance and small footprint. However, coding in assembler meant that I had to do everything myself. If I wanted to draw to the screen, I wrote a line-drawing routine. If I wanted to use floating-point arithmetic, I wrote the floating-point routines. Magazine articles and advice from other developers helped, but the onus was on me to write every byte of the code.

Although this level of responsibility was tricky, having the code under my complete control had its advantages. If it was slow, I could pinpoint the performance glitch and fix it myself. Nowadays, a developer wouldn't dream of designing his own fonts or writing his own printer drivers. All this commonly used functionality has been wrapped up in black boxes and given away or sold in components. The challenge no longer lies in low-level programming; it's in integrating pre-packaged bits of code largely written by other people—and making sure they perform at their optimum levels. The performance of your application will depend largely on third-party components whose implementation is hidden, and over which you have no control.