Twenty Years of cSuneido

Last week was a milestone. We (my company) finished converting all our customers from cSuneido (the original C++ implementation) to gSuneido (the most recent implementation, in Go).

That means I no longer have to maintain cSuneido and I no longer have to deal with C++. (sigh of relief)

cSuneido has had a good run. We first deployed it to the first customer in 2000, so it's been in continuous production use for over 20 years. It's served us well.

When I first started developing Suneido, in the late 1990's, C++ was relatively new on PC's. I started with Walter Bright's Zortech C++ which became Symantec C++ (and later Digital Mars C++). Later I moved to Microsoft C++ and MinGW.

Suneido, like most dynamic languages is garbage collected. But C++ is not. I implemented a series of my own increasingly sophisticated conservative garbage collectors. But eventually I admitted my time was better spent on other things and I switched to using the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector. Under normal use conservative garbage collection works well. But there are cases where memory is not recycled and eventually you run out. That was somewhat tolerable on the client side, but it wasn't so good on the server side. (That was one of the factors that prompted the development of jSuneido, the Java version that we use on the server side. Another factor was the lack of concurrency support in C++ at that time.) It seemed for a while that the pendulum was swinging towards garbage collection. But Rust has given new life to manual memory management.

Honestly, I won't be sorry to leave C++ behind. It has grown to be extremely complex, and while you can avoid much of that complexity, it's hard to not be affected by it. I've also had my fill of unsafe languages. Even after 20 years of fixing bugs, there are very likely still things like potential buffer overflows in cSuneido. (Ironically, one of the things that added a lot of complexity to C++ was template generics. Meanwhile I am anxiously waiting for the upcoming addition of generics in Go. However, Go's generics will be much simpler than C++'s Turing complete template programming.)

While it might seem crazy to re-implement the same program (Suneido) three times, it's been an interesting exercise. I've learned things each time, and made improvements each time. It's been extra work to maintain multiple versions, but it's also caught bugs that would have been missed if I'd only had a single implementation. Doing it in three quite different languages - C++, Java, and Go, has also been enlightening. And having the hard constraint of needing to flawlessly run a large existing code base (about a million lines of Suneido code) means I've avoided most of the dangers of "second system" effects.

So far I've only implemented the client side of gSuneido. We are still using jSuneido (the Java version) for the server side. I'm currently working on implementing the database/server for gSuneido (in Go). Once that's finished I intend to retire jSuneido as well and be back to a single implementation to maintain, like the good old days :-) And given where I'm at in my career gSuneido will almost certainly be the last implementation I do. I wonder if it will last as long as cSuneido did?