[nrr]

I'm not sure your definition of high-performance software development and mine coincide here, in any sense imaginable.

In the programmer-performance sense, just snagging an off-the-shelf component and shoehorning it into your product will let you ship something far sooner than otherwise. Who cares if the code looks nice right now? Just ship the damn thing!

In the runtime-performance sense, the whole mess becomes a case of "someone else's problem." If you purchase a component, I'd say you have a lot of leverage to complain that a particular piece of software isn't performant or secure. If it's open source, write patches and, if politics becomes a problem, step on someone's toes.

[v4us]

I ment runtime-performance.

Off-the-shelf components will make you to code fatster and prolly much more flexible. Don't programm is really greate rule.

Don't programm and keep your code as simple as possible

[nrr]

You subscribe to the rose-colored glasses version. :) I'm sensing a trust issue or two w/r code written by others, but that's okay.

In reality, while you'd like to keep your code as simple as possible, it's often impossible even to keep the simplest things simple because you have numerous bad designs from the past to use as a foundation for whatever it is you're building.

UNIX? Sucks. X11? Sucks. Windows NT? Sucks. Win32? Sucks. .NET? Sucks. PHP? Sucks. Perl? Sucks. Ruby? Sucks. Everything? Sucks.

Any one of these will pose a decent enough challenge somewhere down the line. What really becomes a problem, though, is gluing a good chunk of that mess together somehow.

Get your product out now and then worry about runtime performance.

If that ends up being a big concern early on anyway, I suppose you could pull a Google and just hype the hell out of your product while letting in a small amount of early adopters. ;)

[v4us]

Yup it is mix. You know, Life has alot of compromizes

[nrr]

Fortunately, academic pursuits only require compromises in terms of politics. ;)

[v4us]

Yup it is mix. You know, Life has alot of compromizes