Agree or disagree: It used to be easier to make money from a traditional C++ library than it is today?

I'd assume so if for no other reason than the decreased market.

Personally, I see code generation of this kind as basically the same thing as starting a stand in the local shopping mall food court that offers to microwave anything you bring them for a modest fee.

Yes, it's technically possible, but I really fail to see who the target market would be. Either you just bought hot food from the food court, or you're not at the food court and the microwave stand isn't accessible. Maybe once in a blue moon someone would have a good reason to take something to the food court microwave stand, but are they going to want to spend $5 on it? Or would they just go home and use the microwave they already own, for free? (Suppose you want to do something cool like microwave a DVD. It's amazing to watch, incredibly dangerous to your health, and a bad idea, so don't do it. But are you gonna waste $5 and risk getting kicked out of the mall for causing a health hazard when you could just nuke the damn thing in your basement instead?)


To clarify slightly: when I want to do code generation, it's for things that are generally either (A) extremely well understood (say, parser generation) or (B) extremely domain specific. In the former case, I don't want a service because there's already excellent software that does it for free. In the latter case, I don't want a service, because I'm probably going to be the only person with my exact requirements and desires for the generation process. It'd be far more work to codify the generation into a mechanism that a service can understand than to just write the bloody code generator myself.

Code generation is not hard. When you need it, you either use an existing solution, or you roll one that's hand-tailored to what you need.

You'd never spend money on a mall-microwave-stand, and you'd never spend money on a code generation service.


Just my opinion, though.