Saturday, September 11, 2010

Most often Stack/runtime does it better than you

Throughout my interaction with many developers/experienced people i
sometimes find it hard to explain/convince people that the code written
by runtime is cheaper and well thought of than trying to do the same in
application layer.

Most of the tracking/diagnostic are well handled by the technology stack
or the runtime. eg; Your OS,DB or your VM can do much cheaply and safely
the tracking and diagnostic capabilities for your application running on
top of them. So there is no reason why you one may need to do that same
in your application code and you can focus on your business/logic of the
application. Yet one may have to ocassionally use the underlying
diagnostic facilities/external API exposed to add some context which may
be the only thing i see missing in the underlying diagnostic
capabilities exposed by the stack/runtime for you.

Having said that things are different for each stack/runtime today and
the extent to which you can use the underlying diagnostic may vary and
rarely you may see benefit in writing some code on your own for doing a
diagnostic tracking/control mechanism

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