Redis for win32 and the Microsoft patch

http://antirez.com/post/redis-win32-msft-patch.html

by antirez • 15 years ago

138 161 15 years ago

blub• 15 years ago

I am not very familiar with webscale databases like this, but the reason for rejecting the patch is weak. I mean "even if you want to run your code under win32 systems what's wrong about installing Linux boxes to run Redis?".

This is simply missing the point of cross-platform software...

mythz2• 15 years ago

You're missing the point of developing highly-tuned, quality, production-based server software. Redis is not you're average Java/.NET user-level application, it's one of the fastest NoSQL solutions in existence.

@antirez wants to take advantage of the underlying POSIX platform and as such Redis takes advantage of unique features only available on *nix. His point is merging the patch increases the size and complexity of the project (whilst reducing stability) - detracts from his mission of making Redis run exceptionally well on POSIX platforms.

He also highlights that Windows/.NET shops like StackOverflow have no problem setting aside linux servers to run host Redis servers in production.

coffeemug• 15 years ago

Quake is one of the most highly-tuned, quality, production high-performance software, and it runs on tons of platforms from Linux, to Windows, to even an iPad. High performance software is not incompatible with portability.

Redis's performance (compared to traditional databases) comes from the fact that the data structures are maintained in memory, which turns out to be a really good tradeoff when your data set is small. That has nothing to do with POSIX, or unix. The point of contention is the fact that Windows does not have an efficient implementation of fork, which enables copy-on-write semantics. Redis uses that to periodically dump data to disk without blocking the original process. This is a really clever use of a feature unique to unix, but one man's cleverness is another man's limitation.

Building cross platform software really forces you to examine your architectural decisions, learn about other platforms (and by extension, the limitations of your own), and your software always ends up having a better architecture when you're done with the porting process (in addition to being usable by more people).

@antirez's arguments regarding complexity, additional testing, etc. make total sense, but your performance/stability argument doesn't hold water.

davidw• 15 years ago

I think his point is that redis will likely always be focused on Linux as a deployment platform: it is going to run better there.

If people are signing up to use it because it's fast, what's the point of deploying it somewhere that slows it way down?

antirez5• 15 years ago

Indeed it is already a non trivial effort to make sure that it will run fine under the major free unix systems out there, like *BSD... so our main target is Linux, but we try to do our best to make it working well on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X as well.

Argorak• 15 years ago

Yes, its missing the point of cross-platform software. But redis is not intended to be cross-platform.

The interesting part in antirez argument is that he seems to be a proponent of mixed-platform deployments, so that interoperability can be achieved on a different level.

cloudhead• 15 years ago

The patch adds a lot more code than useful functionality, simple as that.

axefrog3• 15 years ago

Plenty of developers learn a specific platform and are comfortable using that platform, setting it up and know the ins and outs of securing it. Yes, yes of course they should learn the other platform but really if you're trying to get a job done, you want to be sure you know what you're doing. Learning a different platform to a competent level is not really what you want to be doing when you're trying to implement production-ready systems under time and cost constraints.

So when he says "even if you want to run your code under win32 systems what's wrong about installing Linux boxes to run Redis", I can't help but feel he's being a bit narrow-minded. If it were a valid argument, then why port any software to work under win32 at all? Why bother with node.exe? Why bother with Windows implementations of MySQL, MongoDB or PostgreSQL?

In fact, lots of software starts out as Windows software and is ported to Linux. Why not just tell Linux users to get a Windows box if they want to run that software? I would suggest that the author revisit this viewpoint and consider why the majority of products with which he competes have chosen the platform-agnosticism route.

rbanffy• 15 years ago

It seems you missed the part he mentions there is already a Windows-compatible fork that's better than Microsoft's patch (equally unsuitable for production use, less changes to the original codebase).

So, you can already run Redis on Windows, if you are so inclined. I too don't like using VMs to develop, and that's why I use Linux for my work environment, but, if you want to have a production-grade OS and be able to run Windows software, VMs are the only way.

antirez5• 15 years ago

I think that multi platform code makes sense for many kind of software, mainly for client software (an email client, a browser, and torrent client), but Redis is useful in deployments, where the developer has control about what to run when deploying software, and Linux has the interesting feature of being free and open source.

But you said, there are other instances of win32 ports of system software like MySQL, MongoDB and so forth. I guess that they are interested in providing more value to their product allowing a larger diffusion, I'm not enough into marketing to value such a thing, in my opinion people running Apache or MongoDB under win32 for deployment are doing it wrong, and I don't want to help.

But again, I just don't want to personally help an effort that is useless in my opinion, but I'm not either against such an effort. Redis is open source, enough people interested in making it working under win32? Perfect, as I said I'm open to help and recognize their efforts in the main project site, I just don't want to be involved. Life is too short to spend it developing something you don't trust.

axefrog3• 15 years ago

It's a shame you feel that way. I understand there is technical limitation due to the blocking nature of one of the subcomponents, but if Microsoft (or some other organization) solved that issue, it sounds like you'd continue mixing open source politics with your product development decisions which I would argue isn't conducive to more widespread adoption of the software or the health the software's ecosystem.

It does of course make sense as I assume you're developing this because you want to, and not as part of a company's bottom line, which means really you can do whatever you like. No sense developing something if you're not enjoying the process. If however you ever take this to a level where you have a financial incentive in furthering the software's adoption, I'd urge you to do whatever it takes to get an official Windows port in there, which would mean looking at any aspects of the implementation that cause issues on that platform, and doing what you can do to overcome them.

nathanwdavis• 15 years ago

Antirez, with this reasoning perhaps it makes sense for the official Redis project to support an official redis-cli (the command line client) for Windows.

I agree that installing Redis on Windows is kind of "doing it wrong", but the ability to easily access a Redis server with redis-cli even on Windows seems to be pretty important to the continued increase in user base.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I understand there is a redis-cli for Window at https://github.com/dmajkic/redis/downloads , but a separate download that users must know about and keep up to date separately is a barrier to entry, IMHO.

regularfry8• 15 years ago

It would be worthwhile investigating how the SQLite project approach this issue. I see a lot of parallels between the two projects.

tghw6• 15 years ago

We use Redis quite a bit in one of our products, Kiln. Because Kiln is mainly a Mercurial hosting platform, we offer it as a hosted product on our servers or, for companies who would prefer to have tighter control of where their source code goes, as an installed product on our customer's servers. As Kiln is written in .Net, we require that users installing it use Windows. Asking our customers to also set up a separate %nix box (or VM), just to run Redis, is too much.

In the first versions of Kiln, we had to ship a Python clone of Redis we called MiniRedis (it only implemented the subset of commands we used) because of the lack of Windows support. We're now shipping the Cygwin build of Redis to run on Windows, which is less than ideal.

I sincerely hope you'll reconsider your position. I believe it is, at best, myopic to think that %nix is the only place people will want to host Redis, or that it has in any way "won" as the only hosting platform.

bad_user7• 15 years ago

Redis can be used for development on Windows. Other than that, people that are hosting software like Memcached, Apache, NGinx and PostgreSQL on Windows should be fired. If you're not up to it than you can always find other people to do it for you.

For convenience you could also run any Linux-specific software in VirtualBox or VMWare on the same machine. You could also install an X-Server on Windows and open Linux apps in their own window on the Windows desktop. I've done it, works great. And you can always find somebody to help out, you only need to ask. Haven't you heard? Virtualization is the future ;)

It is an author's right to devote his time to whatever the fuck he feels like doing. If he feels like there are more important things to work on, rather than Win32 support, then so be it.

If you can't stand this situation you can always port it yourself, send a patch, etc, etc... You can also be hard-core, like the Mono people that reimplemented .NET from scratch because Microsoft doesn't think of Linux as a useful target.

CJefferson3• 15 years ago

"If you can't stand this situation you can always port it yourself, send a patch, etc, etc..."

Isn't the whole point of this article that Microsoft sent a patch, and it is being rejected, just to avoid supporting win32?

buff-a5• 15 years ago

Learning a different platform to a competent level is not really what you want to be doing when you're trying to implement production-ready systems under time and cost constraints.

BINGO.

Hence, he isn't.

But when he follows your own logic, you call him "narrow minded".

axefrog3• 15 years ago

My argument is more against the sentiment that could be summed up as "meh, just use Linux". What you say is absolutely fair enough, but should Microsoft (or other contributors) overcome the expressed limitations, then a promoted Windows port makes sense.

beagle320• 15 years ago

> If it were a valid argument, then why port any software to work under win32 at all?

That is a great philosophical question, and different people will have different answers, all valid; however:

> "Installing Linux boxes to run Redis", I can't help but feel he's being a bit narrow-minded.

> Why not just tell Linux users to get a Windows box if they want to run that software?

This is not a symmetric win32<->linux case. If you're a win user, and you need Redis, you can run it today, for free, starting 10 minutes from now (30 if you've never done this before and need to download stuff):

download oracle virtualbox; download ubuntu server install, install inside virtualbox inside ubuntu, sudo apt-get install redis-server

And really, that's all there is to it; if you are an experienced windows developer with no Linux experience whatsoever, this will take you all of 30 minutes (25 of which just waiting for downloads). It actually performs quite well; not as well as running directly on iron, but probably not more than 10% slower than a native port that does everything right (The current native ports are 100000% slower during syncing to disk)

If you're a linux user and you want to run a windows-only server, that costs your $100 or so for a retail win7 license, a few hours of downloading and 20-30 minutes of active setup last time I did that. Want to fire that up on 3 developer machines? That would be $200 more, thank you. Reconfigured your virtual box more than 5 times? You have to talk to Microsoft before you can proceed.

So, really, what he offers IS a viable solution for windows developers. Really. Try it before you consider it "narrow minded". You might find the narrow mindedness was not where you expected.

> In fact, lots of software starts out as Windows software and is ported to Linux.

The few I am aware of are picasa and 7zip, of which I only ever use the latter. Do you have more examples?

It's actually significantly harder to port Windows programs to Linux than the other way around, because the Win32 API has about 100 times more functions, and the standard practice (cheerfully supported and encouraged by Microsoft) is to use all of them.

thinkdevcode2• 15 years ago

> So, really, what he offers IS a viable solution for windows developers. Really. Try it before you consider it "narrow minded". You might find the narrow mindedness was not where you expected.

I believe that thought is narrow-minded because you are not thinking in terms of enterprise. This would probably work in a startup, or maybe even in a mid-size business. But in an enterprise, going to your manager and asking to fire up a linux VM in a Microsoft shop will probably get you reprimanded (or laughed at). I would love to use linux all day, but we can't do it as there is no freedom to. With a Windows port, I could create a business case for it and get a VM provisioned with Windows Server on it within a short period of time. Honestly, as bad as this sounds, money for small things like Windows licenses is not an issue when it comes to enterprise.

slig2• 15 years ago

Here's possible outcome:

- Half-assed port for windows appears, with a big "NOT SUITABLE FOR PRODUCTION";

- Clueless programmers will simple google "redis windows", hit the first compiled version "redis.exe" and use it, eventually shipping it to production;

- They'll then hit the official support forums and SO with "Redis doesn't work!!"

va_coder• 15 years ago

I find little sympathy for the MS world.

How about a port of IE to Linux so I can test websites with it? How about the ability to install multiple versions of IE on Windows? I could go on....

seabee• 15 years ago

> How about the ability to install multiple versions of IE on Windows?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-multip...

As you might expect it's using virtualization, but nothing that isn't included in Windows 7 Professional and up.

est• 15 years ago

IE relies on mshtml which relies on COM which is basically, well, core Win32. IE is also the largest OLE container.

MichaelGG• 15 years ago

But that was a decision they deliberately took. At one point, IE had versions for UNIX and Mac.

nknight9• 15 years ago

And Redis relies on POSIX semantics, which is... er... core POSIX?

Microsoft does have a third option, you know. One many of us would love to see happen: real, first-class POSIX support in Windows.

bad_user7• 15 years ago

Btw, you can run the freely provided virtual machines with multiple IExplorer versions on Linux with VirtualBox.

Here's the script that will install them for you (works on my Ubuntu): https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

ken• 15 years ago

Have you gotten this to work recently? It looks like this script fetches the images that are listed on http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575 which they say "will shutdown and become completely unusable on November 17, 2011".

Someone has reported this a couple days ago on their forum http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie8-windows_xp/w... but there's been no response.

Other questions on that forum indicate that there was exactly the same issue in 2010 and in 2009, so it looks like in practice, you can test with old versions of IE for free, but only in the summer months. It's certainly better than nothing, but it's not something I would depend on.

skrebbel12• 15 years ago

Antirez makes the point that linux has won the SW deployment war. And, really, it hasn't, with the possible exception of web startups. A lot of software isn't standard SaaS web stuff, and a lot of software won't for a long time, for all kinds of practical reasons.

Antirez, if you could try and imagine how Redis could be used in different environments (inside devices, as a component in 'end-user' business software, and so on), you might see why 'deployment' and 'servers' and 'the cloud' is not at all the only area where Redis might shine. It's your project so your choice, but don't neglect industries and areas simply because those involved in it aren't so represented among your twitter followers!

slig2• 15 years ago

How dare he neglect the poor industrie? He really should stop the development of new features and start worrying about porting and maintaining his software to range of different environments.

joelthelion• 15 years ago

>Antirez, if you could try and imagine how Redis could be used in different environments (inside devices, as a component in 'end-user' business software, and so on), you might see why 'deployment' and 'servers' and 'the cloud' is not at all the only area where Redis might shine. It's your project so your choice, but don't neglect industries and areas simply because those involved in it aren't so represented among your twitter followers!

This is how you go from a great, focused project to a buggy and bloated one-size-fits-all project that gets gradually abandoned and replaced by a new fad.

regularfry8• 15 years ago

What, like SQLite?

buff-a5• 15 years ago

He perhaps should have said Posix, or "not-windows". "Redis is written in ANSI C and works in most POSIX systems like Linux, BSD, OS X and Solaris without external dependencies." [1]

So I think if you stack IBM, Oracle, HP, and everyone else Redis runs on without modification, his point stands.

[1] http://redis.io/topics/introduction

And, really, it hasn't, with the possible exception of web startups

Hello!!! You are posting this comment where??? And have you heard of this little web startup named facebook? They use linux apparently. Zynga? Linux. Oh, yeah, Google, they use Windows, right? Amazon. And the largest company in the US, Apple, they use windows too, yeah?

Oh. You mean those other, giant, windows-using companies we're reading about daily in the Wall Street Journal.

wulczer2• 15 years ago

Yeah, those other companies like Walmart, UPS, Boeing... you know, the ones based outside of Silicon Valley, deeply entrenched in the real world.

skrebbel12• 15 years ago

> Hello!!! You are posting this comment where???

Apparently, posting on Hacker News now means "you're supposed to disregard the entire world except web firms, or else you don't belong here"? Come on, man.

Duff2• 15 years ago

I think that outside of larger enterprises with EA's, Microsoft is losing traction. So it's broader than just web startups.

But inside of many big corporate and government environments, Windows rules the roost. I think there's a good reason for that -- Microsoft enterprise stuff usually works. In big orgs, Linux/Unix is associated with "big iron" , "big dollar" nightmares from Oracle, CA, etc.

Mavrik• 15 years ago

Huh... you're kinda wrong. Microsoft has never been stronger in server market and it's one of the platforms where their penetration is growing.

llambda• 15 years ago

> Antirez, if you could try and imagine how Redis could be used in different environments

It's this shortsightedness in the leaders of open source endeavors, of all kinds, that can be a deterrent to outsiders. Not that it's wrong or bad to do something the way you want because it's your project and needs to fit your needs, however that said if it's to see wider adoption you have to look beyond what it is now. If a project is to be more than a personal project then it needs to take into account needs that are more than your personal needs. If the best course of action is to develop two independent projects, then so be it, but it would be foolish to dismiss the whole Windows ecosystem if one wants to see a project more widely adopted (although maybe that isn't any kind of priority, it depends on your perspective and harkens back to the frustration some people have with one personality leading a project).

skrebbel12• 15 years ago

In all honesty, I think antirez is a great example when it comes to open source developers who take into account needs that are more than his personal needs.

In fact, the linked article even underlines this: he perceived a user need for a Windows port, took it very much into account, and carefully wrote a blog post about why he chose not to go down that path.

I may believe that some assumptions in that blog post are too strong, but I very much think that even writing the blog post shows that antirez cares very much about stuff he's not personally helped by.

So calling antirez "short sighted" because of this is, well, IMHO, a bit beside the mark.

beagle320• 15 years ago

Could you help me imagine how Redis can be used inside devices, or as a component in 'end-user' business business software? (unless it employs a "server").

Redis does one small thing and does it amazingly well -- an in-memory database with persistence and some very useful operations (such as FIFO lists) that do not need roundtrips.

That does not make sense inside a device unless you have ridiculous amounts of RAM to spare (which has never been the case in my experience).

Similarly, it makes very little sense in an "end-user" business software, unless there are _multiple_ processes needing access to the same in-memory data. And that (to me) means a "server" is going to appear sooner or later.

Really, unless you run it on a "server", then sqlite with properly set cache parameters is almost surely a better choice, and works on Win32 since 2002 or so.

Where it makes sense to deploy Redis, looks to me like antirez is right and Unix has won. And even though Redis likely works on iOS and Android out of the box, it makes no sense to do so, at least not at this point.

regularfry8• 15 years ago

It might make sense for end-user business software if that software ever has to be run offline.

skrebbel12• 15 years ago

> Could you help me imagine how Redis can be used inside devices, or as a component in 'end-user' business business software? (unless it employs a "server").

Not all devices are phone-like end-user devices.

I can imagine a machine that produces something. It is full of sensors and actuators, plus logic that uses sensor input to compute what the actuators most be doing. Typically one would store some recent sensor + actuator decision data in RAM to calculate averages, do all kinds of computations, etc.

Storing the same data in Redis instead gives you all that, but persistence for free. That's great, because it means developers / maintenance people / support people can always get a decent dump of what recently happened, without much overhead or extra work. The memory is the log. Elegant!

Computer systems that control factory processes, such as SCADA and MES systems, often have to deal with large amounts of data coming in from many different machines. Most vendors therefore wrote what they call a "real-time database", even though it is not really real-time, just fast. Redis would be a great substitute for such a database.

A high-performance multifunctional office printer has a large memory of jobs sent to it by many different people; print jobs, scan jobs, and so on. These often incorporate fair amounts of data, but the data processing speed requirements are very high because the printer is so ridiculously fast. I imagine that right now the entire job data structure is effectively held in memory and hand-persisted just in case the printer fails; people wouldn't want to lose their print jobs, would they? Persisting data that must be held in RAM for performance reasons. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

I'm not saying Redis is the ideal choice for these particular cases. I'm just quickly braindumping some examples.

I must admit I can't come up with a great end-user business SW example right now though. Maybe I was off the mark there.

That said, as more business applications are moving to the web too, Redis would be very much applicable there. Many organisations (think offices, services sector) have their entire custom-built internal IT systems based on Windows. Much of this is probably a relic of the vendor lock-in practices that MS was very effective with a decade ago, but they're still there and as MS keeps supplying excellent dev tooling, it's unlikely to go away any time soon. Imagine a team of 10 sysadmins for a 3000 person company all highly skilled in administering Windows systems. Moving such people to Linux "just" to administer a Redis installation is impractical, and the company will rather disregard Redis for other options.

skrebbel12• 15 years ago

I said "linux" where I should've said POSIX. Sorry about that mistake.

wpeterson• 15 years ago

Unless you're using Microsoft servers/tools like .NET, this is another nail in the coffin as Windows machines as a viable platform for most web-development.

I spent the first year of my Rails development on Windows and it was so painful - slower, strange bugs, many unsupported tools/libraries.

This seems like a reasonable decision, but one in a long list of reasons you can't easily develop on Windows unless you're targeting a Microsoft stack for your product.

untog• 15 years ago

Yes and no. I sometimes develop in Windows (I find the UI easier to work with than OS X or Linux, just a personal preference) and I just run all the server-side tools I need in a tiny Linux VirtualBox VM.

It's an ideal setup, really- when I'm done with development and watch to kick back and watch a movie, I just put the VM into sleep mode and kill off those background tasks.

shin_lao3• 15 years ago

I don't think Redis running under win32 is a very important feature. It is cool to have a win32 port that can be used for testing, as we had before, and as we have in a different implementation thanks to the Microsoft patch, so developers using Windows can easily test Redis and develop their projects. But what is the point in providing a production quality win32 port?

Roughly 60% of our customers run Windows servers in production (2003 or 2008) which is why we support Windows as a first citizen platform. These customers have no desire to run Linux boxes for various reasons and we would simply lose deals if we didn't support their environment.

We've managed to deliver the same level of performance for all platforms we support, and although our NoSQL product is very different from Redis I think you could fully support Windows if you wanted to.

Additionally, I know from experience that supporting multi-platform greatly increases the code quality and robustness. Obscure race conditions or memory problems may be revealed by such support.

Nevertheless, adding support for a platform a posteriori is a huge task and you have the right to consider it's not worth it.

FooBarWidget• 15 years ago

If code quality is your concern then supporting multiple Unix variants already does a good job at revealing bugs. Supporting Windows and Unix is a whole different beast. They're so radically different that you're essentially writing two different versions of the code. And since all abstractions are leaky, fixing a bug that occurs on Windows may not fix a bug on Unix; it may even introduce a bug in Unix.

shin_lao3• 15 years ago

There is already a huge amount of libraries that abstract the hard part for you. 95% of our C++ code isn't platform specific and we support FreeBSD, Linux and Windows.

moondowner2• 15 years ago

But that are your customers, every company is not the same.

lhaussknecht• 15 years ago

I'd really appreciate a supported Windows version. We are a MS shop and nobody want's to administrate a linux box here.

It would be cool to have a VMWare Virtual Appliance Ready to go. Shouldn't be too hard since Redis is sponsored by VMware ;)

antirez5• 15 years ago

I just linked the two win32 ports to the project download page: http://redis.io/download this will hopefully expose the two efforts more and may result if there is a real community around it into a redis-win32 project to mature.

moondowner2• 15 years ago

Totally right blog post from antirez, I agree with him as for his plans to his attitude.

pgroves• 15 years ago

As a Linux user who keeps a Windows desktop around just for Netflix and Steam, I find this deeply (and devilishly) satisfying. Telling people they're platform isn't supported because it's just not an important enough market is something I've been hearing for over a decade now.

MS coming out the message "but...but...but...you should support everybody!" is a bit of a pot/kettle situation and I hope they are treated with the same passive-aggressive apathy as they treated Linux and Mac users for all those years.

I know I'm being petty but I can't seem to make myself stop smiling.

protomyth3• 15 years ago

I would have hoped we all know how we felt and try not to do the same things Microsoft did. What comes around goes around and I really don't want to be on the receiving end again.

beagle320• 15 years ago

> he same things Microsoft did.

Are still doing.

> What comes around goes around and I really don't want to be on the receiving end again.

You're still on the receiving end. And "what comes around goes around" is simply what's happening to Microsoft in this case.

tghw6• 15 years ago

First, let's not get confused here. If you keep a Windows box around for Netflix and Steam, that has nothing to do with Microsoft's "passive-aggressive apathy". It has to do with the fact that Netflix and Steam chose not to develop for Linux, just like antirez is choosing not to develop for Windows. I would bet that having to keep that extra Windows box around is at least a minor annoyance to you, that you'd much rather be able to use Linux for everything, including Netflix and Steam.

This is the exact same situation Windows users are in with Redis. Except that, instead of just "coming out the message 'but...but...but...you should support everybody!'", Microsoft actually did something very helpful. They didn't just complain, they took it upon themselves to help improve the situation with Redis by providing the patch.

Let's also be clear that when comparing Microsoft and antirez (or open source software in general), we're comparing two very different things. We all know that Microsoft is a for-profit company, so expecting them to go out of their way to improve their competitors isn't really reasonable. Open source software, however, is about making software freely accessible to everyone, so an expectation, or hope, that antirez would embrace Windows support is quite reasonable.

Of course, that's not to say he has to. It is his project, and there for his right to choose not to support it. But I personally think it's a mistake. He is encouraging a fork, and forks generally lead to problems. Client libraries will have multiple versions to target. Developers will have more to learn, and more time will be spent trying to keep feature parity between the forks.

nknight9• 15 years ago

The fundamental problem people are having seems to be "antirez won't support Windows".

Let's say BigCorp really wants to use Redis, but only supports Windows.

Why is it OK for them to ask antirez to support Windows, but not OK for antirez to ask them to support Linux/POSIX?

Don't go with a kneejerk response, think about it.

Neither party in this relationship has any special obligation to the other, there's no contract, no money is changing hands.

BigCorp wants antirez to support their preferred software (Windows), antirez wants BigCorp to support his (Linux and/or POSIX).

It will cost BigCorp more to support POSIX, you might say. But cost them more relative to what? Of their tens of thousands of employees, billions in revenue, BigCorp would be dedicating an infinitesimal fraction of its resources to supporting a POSIX-compatible OS.

Meanwhile, a huge fraction of antirez's time will be spent dealing with the effects of trying to maintain a high-performance, low-level datastore on two utterly incompatible platforms, and the time he spends on that is time taken away from work on other bugs and features, which also amounts to time taken away from all the people who already use Redis on POSIX.

There is no incentive at all for antirez, his employer VMware, or the Redis community at large to go through the pain of integrating Windows support into Redis mainline. There is some incentive for BigCorp to support Linux, since they want to use Redis effectively.

The incentivization is exactly backwards, so it should surprise absolutely no one that antirez isn't prepared to deal with supporting Windows.

angersock7• 15 years ago

So, let's talk about the incentivization issue first.

Why is it OK for them to ask antirez to support Windows, but not OK for antirez to ask them to support Linux/POSIX?

Because antirez has a tool whereas BigCorp presumably has a problem. Because all of us could benefit from this, while only some of us might benefit from BigCorp switching to Linux.

Asking somebody to make their tool more available is, I posit, much more reasonable than asking somebody to change their problems.

BigCorp has potentially hundreds of thousands tied up in existing equipment, IT infrastructure, and training for employees. You and I might not flinch at spinning up a VM to run a database, but we (and the rest of the HN community!) should not fool ourselves into thinking that this is in any way always appropriate for a company.

Or, you know, he might talk with the Microsoft development team and try to get them to take over maintenance of the Microsoft codebase, and clean up the platform-specific architecture that gets in the way--and in so doing, write better code.

If you can't/won't write platform-independent code, you are either lazy or your problem domain is heavily dependent on your platform. As far as I know, in-memory key/value stores aren't a Linux-specific problem, so...

<rant> There is no incentive at all for antirez, his employer VMware, or the Redis community at large to go through the pain of integrating Windows support into Redis mainline.

Let's look past incentives here. Let's talk about Doing the Right Thing.

A huge number of people here make daily use of software packages and stacks that are open source. We owe our livelihoods to the folks that have been kind enough to release the source to their programs and, more importantly, work with the community to improve their code.

We owe it to ourselves and our community to call out people being lazy and selfish, and letting politics overrule sound engineering and decency.

This is an unreasonable decision by antirez. He's got a cool framework. He's got a bunch of code and (presumably) people that are happy to work with him on making it even more useful.

He's also not going for it, because "use linux lol". Not because it's hard, not because he doesn't have folks that can add it, not because the problem extends beyond some refactoring and #ifdefs and makefiles.

Because he's lazy. Because Linux is the One True Way. Because helping out anyone who can't just change their infrastructure on a whim is too much to ask.

Really folks? You don't see a problem with this? </rant>

nknight9• 15 years ago

What a disgusting assault on Salvatore's character. I really don't think anything more needs to be said, your resorting to such attacks pretty well speaks for itself.

tptacek6• 15 years ago

Guy writes code for Linux. Code could theoretically be made to work on Windows. Windows users are therefore entitled to a Windows port.

That's roughly your argument here; I've just done you the favor of adding concision to it. The motivations of all the parties involved, enterprise IT costs, all that jazz, none of that matters. Fundamentally you're saying "if something can be made cross-platform, it's wrong not to make it cross- platform".

That is, to say the least, a comical argument coming from people who want Linux code deployed on Windows.

beagle320• 15 years ago

> If you can't/won't write platform-independent code, you are either lazy or your problem domain is heavily dependent on your platform. As far as I know, in-memory key/value stores aren't a Linux-specific problem, so...

If you can't write your OWN in-memory key/value store, you are either lazy or a parasite.

> Let's talk about Doing the Right Thing.

The right thing for people like you is to, you know, just maintain and release their own Redis port. It is BSD licensed - you don't even have to release the source code if you don't want to. And in fact, a port already exists. So you are either lazy, a parasite, or a troll.

> Because helping out anyone who can't just change their infrastructure on a whim is too much to ask.

Money talks, bullshit walk.

> Really folks? You don't see a problem with this?

Yes, I do see a problem with people like you who feel entitled.

I haven't seen any complaints about Microsoft dropping POSIX support (which, if it was actually usable, would have supported redis out of the box).

generalk5• 15 years ago

  > He's also not going for it, because "use linux lol". Not 
  > because it's hard, not because he doesn't have folks that 
  > can add it, not because the problem extends beyond some 
  > refactoring and #ifdefs and makefiles.

  > Because he's lazy. Because Linux is the One True Way. 
  > Because helping out anyone who can't just change their 
  > infrastructure on a whim is too much to ask.

Seriously? Because he's lazy? Antirez, the author of Redis, is lazy because he won't port his software to the only major non-UNIX platform?

What a load of entitled bullshit.

If I choose to run my infrastructure on Linux I can't complain that I don't get Microsoft's Active Directory. That's one of the consequences of the decision I made. When you choose Windows as your platform, these are the consequences.

You don't get to later yell at the developer of an open-source project you like and call him names because he won't take the time and effort to make his project run under an OS that's significantly different from the one he writes for. Especially after he's said that even though he won't support Windows, he will bless a Redis-win32 project run by someone else.

Yes, let's talk about "Doing the Right Thing." Take the patch Microsoft's team provided and start maintaining it. Write tests and documentation, fix bugs, make it work. Antirez says he won't support Windows himself? There's the code, make it happen. That's why open-source software is awesome.

  > We owe it to ourselves and our community to call out people being lazy and 
  > selfish, and letting politics overrule sound engineering and decency.

You're right. You're being lazy and selfish when you demand that other people make their open-source software for Platform X work on completely different Platform Y just because some folks base their infrastructure on Platform Y. Sound engineering has nothing to do with it, Redis is sound. Decency never comes into play because what operating system your software runs on has nothing to do with morality.

tghw6• 15 years ago

Think about it from the cost perspective. Not necessarily in terms of dollars, but in terms of time. There are thousands of BigCorps out there. There is only one Redis. If every BigCorp that runs mainly on a Windows stack (I'm personally connected to two, Fog Creek and StackOverflow) has to spin up %nix boxes just to run Redis, there will be tens of thousands of hours wasted as each company gets this new environment up and secures and maintains it going forward.

However, if he does support Windows, it might take antirez some extra time to support this patch, mostly front loaded. If it is too much for him personally, he could ask just one of the BigCorps who care about it for some help. (I'll bet Microsoft would be willing to dedicate a dev or two.) The number of hours spent may be in the tens to hundreds, but will be much more efficient overall.

nknight9• 15 years ago

> (I'm personally connected to two, Fog Creek and StackOverflow)

The latter of which, at least, has done exactly what you say you don't want to have happen. Also, neither of those companies are even remotely BigCorp, they're quite small and nimble.

> has to spin up %nix boxes just to run Redis, there will be tens of thousands of hours wasted as each company gets this new environment up and secures and maintains it going forward.

Perhaps an incentive for them to find a way to make an unobtrusive patch that might be accepted into Redis mainline. Or an incentive to press Microsoft for real POSIX support.

None of this is an incentive for antirez, VMware, or anyone else, other than the people who want to run Redis in Windows.

At best, you're arguing the good of society, but getting agreement on what that means requires someone to have made a lot of moral and ethical judgements similar to yours.

beagle320• 15 years ago

In terms of economic efficiency then:

This being a BSD product, BigCorp can do their own port. They can decide to release it or not, based on whether it is more economical for them to share the support load (but also provide the "profit" to their competitors), or not.

Microsoft chose not to with their BSD Socket modification, for example. They can just as well do the same for Redis.

Pure and simple, this is Microsoft tried to get something (remove incentive for people to use competitor) for almost nothing.

When Microsoft NoSQL server arrives (and I suspect it would, sooner or later), if it is even remotely competitive with Redis, you can be sure they'll speak badly of Redis -- they do that to their own products when a new version is out.

saurik2• 15 years ago

FWIW, Microsoft does ship a POSIX implementation called "Subsystem for Unix-based Applications", and it in fact has a working (and I think efficient?) version of fork() (which sounds to be the only thing redis would actually be wanting for once ported to libuv, as this patch does; although, for all I know, libuv doesn't support SUA); that said, it is now deprecated, and will be removed after Windows 8.

eps2• 15 years ago

There is no equivalent to epoll on Windows. There is select (that just happens to get slower when socket's numerical id gets larger). There is also IOCP, which is an ass-backward epoll - a typical Microsoftish contraption that was supposed to be better by being more universal, but ended up being a retarded piece of disaster compared to epoll. I killed a couple of months trying to push and shape IOCP back into the BSD style API, and in the end it worked, but the guts were ugly and the process was utterly unpleasant.

So, no, the "subsystem for unix-based applications" is a no go.

rudiger• 15 years ago

How's the performance of Redis when it's running in a Linux VM?

Redis for win32 and the Microsoft patch

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