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Maxime Lafrenière
Maxime Lafrenière

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When the Sunwing plane party meets the WebDev world: Who is James (Kevin) Awad?

The brain behind the infamous Sunwing plane party claims to made its fortune with fishy C++ tech.

Since I'm from Quebec, Canada - that news is all over the news(indeed), Twitter, Instagram and Reddit and I am trying to dig a little about this individual and its dark fraud background.

Here's what bothers me (a lot):

James William Awad, 28, says he invented a new way to program "in C ++ without having to compile the website." He is said to have sold the license to "several national and international companies", which he refuses to name.

Source: Himself

The question

Is anybody have heard of him or used that C++ "marvel"?

Here's one of its tweet:

Top comments (4)

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tlacroix profile image
tlacroix

No, but I'm guessing the easiest way to do this would be to use the clang libraries directly, or use Cling (root.cern/cling/).

Not sure what the benefit of interpreting uncompiled C++ in an LLVM in realtime would be though. It seems inefficient and overly complicated to me.

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justin_lamouche_e4df3b6ac profile image
Justin Lamouche

Plus there are a lot of security concerns that were picked up by a lot of people which sort of casts doubt on his claim that he made so much money out of it (i.e. north of 10 million dollars).

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tlacroix profile image
tlacroix

And I think he said he sold that tech when he was 12-14, and Cling and easy interfaces to clang libraries didn't exist then I think... and his HTML custom tags syntax looks a lot like old ColdFusion stuff (that died a while ago for good reasons)...

To sum it up, I can see how he could do it now, but I can't see why anyone would do that. And I don't see how someone could have done that 10-15 years ago (nor why they would have tried).

I'm sure you know, but C++ is a compiled language that has many advantages for native apps (because it's compiled into processor native bitcode), but overly complex for anything web related, and there are so many existing, efficient, proven and simpler alternatives: PHP, node.js, Ruby, Python, Java, DotNet (in C# or VB, and most people use VB for web stuff), ...

Wild guess, I'd bet on: "Let's plug two buzzwords in a sentence... sooooooo... (shakes 8Ball)... HTML and... (shakes again...) C++!" 🤷‍♂️

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francis1993z profile image
Francis

The whole giy seems sketchy. I'm sure he's a narcissistic compulsive liar. None of what he claims make sense.