I have a question:
Do you use free- ore shareware C ??
Please say me some good links for freewhare products!
THX!

I whant to ask you what c/c++ you are using.
What firm???

Programmers don't sleep -
they just park their heads

I use gcc, the GNU compiler collection, which is free (as in freedom, not in free beer). It does not belong to any firm but is an OpenSource project. [addsig]

I use lcc, which is a Windows based gcc, and is also free. [addsig]

what c/C++ you use ... :/
I know what compiler I use
I use the best compiler ever (nobody will hardly doubt that), gcc! It's free, fast, stable, easy to use, feature-rich, but stil not bloated. That's why I like it over all other compilers I know
[addsig]

To be honest, I am not competent to really estimate the difference between compilers. I rarely use anything different to gcc and the short time when I used Borland on Windows is simply to short to judge it.

But well, gcc does and it does well. What do I want more from a free tool? [addsig]

That's why I like lcc. Small, simlpe, and FREE. [addsig]

I already a c/c++ version:
VC++
It's not the best... because it's verry confused
But someone explained me how to use it and its already good for me.

But it's not free! [addsig]

not free, _slow_ (REALLY slow), bloated, and, hard to use imho. gcc is way easier to use
[addsig]

Is VC++ a standalone compiler or a whole bundled IDE? [addsig]

On which homepage could I find the free-fast-better version of c ???
plz

http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc.html
Here you can get the best compiler ever
[addsig]

Does this compiler only runs on linux ???

i can mail you gcc for windows

I keep saying... lcc is a WINDOWS BASED gcc compiler. I'm pretty sure anyways. [addsig]

isn't there a native Windows port of GCC? :/
[addsig]

OK
my e-mail: f000l@gmx.net

where on this homepage can I get gcc ???
I clicked on "gcc 3.0.4" and then on "our mirror sites". Then I coosed the ftp.fu-berlin.de ftp-server... but there are 20 files.

To be fair, Microsoft Visual C++ is a very good compiler for Windows. You would expect it to be good after all the millions of dollars that have been spent on Visual Studio. We shouldn't be biased on issues like this ...

The main advantage of gcc is its platform independence, not compiler/code performance or anything else. VC++ is good on WIndows. On Windows, Microsoft stuff is always the best you can get.

He who plays the piper dictates the tune ...

I've had problems with VC++. Of course my CD is bunged up too. [addsig]

I didn't have problems with VC++, but to be honest:
I would not pay a _single_ dollar for that thing.... it's unstable, slow and bloated imho. I think I'm _well_ better served with IDEs like Anjuta, Emacs and stuff.
[addsig]

yeah, cause emacs, it isn't bloated at least!

hehe, vim rocks is there for you [addsig]

ok, let's make this straight:
emacs == bloated
ok, not as much as M$ stuff, but it's packed with useless (for me useless) features, which make things go kinda slow
[addsig]

<rant>
In defence of VC++ (i'll only do this once, I promise) most of it's 'bloatedness' consists simply of features most amateur coders (myself included) rarely bother (or learn) to use.
I know very few programmers who know how to debug; it's fine to just code a 100 line program that works because you've thought it through and you've corrected the typos flagged by the compiler, but if you're working on a project tens of thousands of lines long, not all written by yourself, you're gonna need to master the art of debugging.
A few minutes tracing a program while watching its memory etc can save hours of commenting/uncommenting and thinking up algorithm tests.
</rant>

I god gdb/ddd
[addsig]

I personally like nedit. I didn't see anything great about emacs. It was confusing for me. [addsig]

When you once know all those 2317757598047527508753475235843940854897548923759874 key shortkuts it may be less confusing
[addsig]

Yeah. I couldn't figure out just how to save a stupid document. [addsig]

how about trying the good ol
+S ?
OKok... +C=-->+S
[addsig]

Yeah, really. emacs is for people who really like punching out key combos [addsig]

something like DDR or beatmania?
[addsig]

Im goin totally with yjo on VC++. Nobody can bag on that compiler, cause its got more features, keywords, options and utilities then all of us put together can shake a stick at. (Thats why I use it)

.... and is unstable, bloated and not ANSI C/C++ compilant
[addsig]

give examples!
name some evil ANSI non-compliancy?
just because it's packed with features you dont know how to use (if youve ever even touched vc++) doesn't mean it's bloated!

I have used vc++ before, for about 1 year. After trying to port a OpenGL/GLut application (which happily compiled on GCC, without _any_ errors or warning, and also worked in linux) and tried to compile it in VC++ it refused to compile at any means. I ended up in completely rewriting the code, but that sure isn't much fun if you have bigger apps (mine was only like 1k lines). Afaik GCC refuses to compile non-ansi compilant code by default. So, as a conclusion I could say that VC++ is not ANSI compilant, which sure makes it a bad compiler. And, yes, all header files I used in that program also existed in windows.
Go figure something which would explain that VC++ is ANSI-C compilant

Also, compile times on VC++ are longer than compilation times with GCC. Not _too_ much, but they are. If you don't trust me, go get a program which compiles on both, VC++ and GCC and measure the time it takes to compile. At least on my computer (1GHz Tbird, 1/2GB RAM) gcc was faster than vc++.
Have a nice day.
[addsig]

sorry, that last post was mine.

I've got a debugger to. Ever heard of ddd?
Some IDEs for linux have this feature too (maybe take a look at anjuta).
[addsig]

Yjo: I don't mean to declare that gcc is better than or as good as VC++ overall, but your seeming assumption that one can't profile code (or that it is difficult to do so) with gcc is rather silly. Pretty much every compiler in wide use today supports profiling. See http://www.gnu.org/manual/gprof-2.9.1/gprof.html .

Besides, if you want to quibble about compiler features that affect your productivity, then you should be eager to boost your productivity even more by switching to a better programming language. (Hint: Microsoft doesn't have production quality compilers for any languages that I would say are good choices for application development =))

Just show me a nix text editor that will auto complete your caraible names, manage versioning within your project, and produce output like http://milk.shake.org/~core/3D/profile.txt one second after selecting a menu option!
VC++ might not do anything unique, but it's consistent and intuitive so you can be coding on NOS within a day or two of taking it out of the box, rather than still wallpapering your house with EMACS key sequences.

ooh, and one other thing, it would never take days to figure out somehting trivial like disabling warnings on VC++ http://www.youngprogrammers.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=1133&forum=9&6

[ This Message was edited by: Yjo on 2003-01-09 02:01 ]

ok, first about that silly text file you showed us:
Anjuta can partly (I don't know for sure, maybe even fully) produce such output if you want it to.
And, the way you talk shows us that you have _absolutely_ no understanding of the NIX philosophy:
A NIX program is designed to do a small job, but do it good. All these small apps like grep, wc and such are not of great power alone. The true strength of these (and many other) programs comes to daylight when you combine them. You can assemble a small shell script, which has about 10 lines os some more, which outputs way more information than that textfile you just showed us.

OK, now you may say that you will need to write these scripts first. But, you will also need to understand the contents of such "stats" first before you use them. If you know which program is responsible for what, you'll have such a script written in some minutes, or maybe even do it with 1 single commandline command.

And, normally you don't need to disable compiler warnings, but rather increase the amount of displayed warnings to catch every mistake you have made that the compiler is able to notice.
And, if you use a good NIX IDE, you will also be able to change these "trival" things with 1 click

About those variable names etc:
You still didn't look at anjuta, did you? I think Kdevelop is also able to do this. That is something really basic for a IDE these days. Also, managing versions of your project is something trival with NIX IDEs. And, most NIX IDEs have something which MSVC++ doesn't have, and which many, many developers use on a regular basis:
complete CVS support.
Also, there are some other features which MSVC++ doesn't support. most NIX IDEs can apply certain (even user defined) coding styles to your code (how your code is aligned), GNU make makefiles output, and many others.
Functionality is no argument for using MSVC++ anymore these days, at least not for most developers. MSVC++ supports only C/C++, and NIX IDEs do support many other languages like HTML, perl, php, bash and such too. Also, probably the greatest argument against using MSVC++ is the price. If you can have IDEs with about the same functionality, why should use spend some hundret dollars for a compiler/IDE?
[addsig]

You know what the I in IDE stands for?
Integrated. IE all the tools youre using were designed to work together, right out of the box. If i want to code something, and get it right, i don't want to have to spend an hour and a half collating and configuring twenty different tools just to get a reasonable coding environment.

re:autocompletion anjuta doesn't have any decent auto completion in any of the places it is useful, like suggesting members of composite objects (classes, structs)

re:compiler warnings;warnings are there to flag up elements of code which are legal and compilable, but evidence in the case of stupid people that code isn't doing what was intended.

re CVS: sourcesafe

re:coding stlyes: VC++ does let you configure auto-indentation, position of braces etc, whilst helping to keep your code readable and consistent with the accepted standard.

re:price, as already stated VC++ is designed for writing programs. Unless you are just coding for fun (as most of us will be, get a student license as have i, etc.) the kind of commercial coding project smaller than $100 expected revenue, probably wouldn't need any of the advanced features MSVC is packed with.

oh, and if i can just quote from anjuta.sf:
"Profiling is not yet implemented in Anjuta"
ta.

[ This Message was edited by: Yjo on 2003-01-10 02:45 ]

To me, the most interesting fact of this discussion is, that KaGez and Smerdyakov were (almost) agreeing

Seriously:
I can only say, that it would be pure shame, if a commercial product would be worse than a free one. Its programmers would have to highly doubt the sense of their efforts. Anyway, there are free alternatives out there, which suffice for the needs of at least every amateur coder and most professionals. But as Yjo said, for a company the cost of a commercial ide is not nearly as relevant as the cost of the programmer who uses it, so if it has some nice features and has them all "out-of-the-box", then it might be worth spending some hundred bucks for it.

[addsig]

If I need memory profiling, I use memprof (a program for gnome, just so those not using a real OS know it ).
And, it happens rarely that I need to profile memory. Oh great! I know how much RAM my program uses! These days everybody has _at least_ 64MB for his/her desktop PC (at least those who seriously work with their PC, or play games), so caring about how big your program is in memory etc. doesn't really matter anymore. OK, if you're coding a memory-defragment program, that's a different story. But that's one of the very few things you would need a memory profiler for these days.
Anyways, always good to have, still

And, I won't pay $100US for a simple IDE. OK, you may have 1000s of features in VC++. But, it's just like in M$ Office. Almost nobody cares about such funtions. Most people use a maximum of 5% of all features in M$ Office producs, and the count of features is still going up. Same goes for VC++. I don't know any exact percentage for VC++, but I'd guess that it isn't much more.
And, having everything in one place could also be a quite bad idea. Just as I said above, VC++ puts all those 1000s of features on your harddrive. And, if you would only need 50MB out of the 600MB that VC++ consists of, it's a real waste. OK, 550MB isn't much anymore today, but you could almost store the contents of a whole CD on your harddrive instead of those useless features.
If you have all programs spread up like NIX progs, you can _choose_ what you need/want, and you will waste a lot less of space. And, you know what features you have, and you know hot to use them.

But, those who have too much of money, and buy a new HDD or M$ program once a week/month should use those M$ products. I never spent a single cent on my linux distro I use now. I give something back to the gentoo linux community in form of documentation translation. That's fun for me, and I can use the prog/distro for free.
M$ would need some help too, but I think nobody would be really willing to help there for free
[addsig]

-->free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 320980 311116 9864 0 0 127044

Actually, sometimes I think it'd be ncie if people cared a bit more about how much ram they used (:

I think the importance of memory usage highly depends on the kind of program you write. No matter how huge a ram is, there are ways to fill it. [addsig]

erm.... wtf? I think as of now anonymous posting is disallowed

Anyways, about that RAM story:
For example if you write a game, you will not care about RAM _too_ much. I mean, either you can load all textures, models, maps etc. into RAM or you can't. You can compress the stuff, which will reduce the speed highly, a drawback wich is not worth it. And, as long as you don't write _much_ of useless code, it's quite hard to fill up RAM. You could build some mem leaks, but those aren't too easy to create too if you pay attention
[addsig]

OK.... Somebodys like hating me for some reason??
Anyhow. I got some questions:
1) Sure gcc is all good and well, but how long does it take you to write a dll in it?
2) how long does it take you to write an activeX control
3) how long does it take you to write a (portable) COM component

in VC++ you can write a simple version of all of these using ATL and MFC in roughly 10 or so mouse clicks. Can you beat that with GCC?

To neonbjb:

You are comparing a simple compiler (gcc), to a full featured commercial (very expensive) IDE (Visual C++).

ATL & MFC are proprietary libraries so Open Source people can't use them although some brave inviduals might be able to someday hack the source to compile under GCC.

So it's rather unfair to compare VC++ to GCC.

On your points:
1) With Dev C++, making a DLL is as easy as in Visual Studio.
2) ActiveX control is something Windows specific.
3) Portable COM components... rather funny. If you mean portable to any Microsoft sponsored platforms, then yeah, that's fine. But COM components are not portable to *nix nor Linux or any other open or free x86 source OS.

Also, ActiveX and COM are somewhat advanced technologies. If someone really need to build an ActiveX control or a COM component, they should actually buy some IDE for it. Delphi, Visual Basic and Borland C++ Builder can do it fine.

Hobbyist programmer on Win32 usually stay away from COM and ActiveX. That's the kind of people GCC and free IDEs are for. If they need any of the caracteristics of COM, they can always use some of the other alternative ORBs on the WWW.

Hehe, how little u know yet you speak of it. I have read around 5 books on COM and they all seem to agree that THERE IS a way to port things like DCOM to Macintosh, Unix and (I think) Linux. In modern days of programming, OO programming has fallen and Interface Oriented has arisen. Anyone who uses Java has to agree, cause thats the whole point of Java. COM is simply the best way to use non-open source Interface Programming. (Simply because it is massively supported by one of Americas largest computer software corporations). As for using gcc, i have no doubt that you CAN build COM components in it. My point is that VC++ (being the major industrial monster it is) is slow for reasons, and isnt the devil because it does (in one way or another) support platform independence and offer hundreds of options users of GCC could never hope to have

Yes alright. I don't know much about the internals of COM because I've never really had to use it. Nor that I can compare it to other open solutions available. But I know what is COM and what it is used for.

You have to admit that if COM is the most used object model on the market, it doesn't make it the best way.

COM must work on Mac because Microsoft develops applications for Mac. I've also read somewhere that some company ported to some ultra-commercial versions of Unix, surely not on x86 platform. I've never seens anything related to the usage of COM components in Linux. There may be some commercial stuff but that rules out the vast majority of the Linux users.

In fact, I pretty much agree with you except for one point:

"and isnt the devil because it does (in one way or another) support platform independence"

I could take that down by using predictables arguments but I still hope that I misunderstood what you said there...

[ This Message was edited by: Neu[Mann] on 2003-02-28 13:14 ]

thank you, thank you. Finnally ive made a small point. I can agree with you that VC++ is not in most ways portable; but it is possible to write platform-independent code in it. OMG, i sound like a Java freak *beatin maiself over the head*

Yes, if you use a cross-platform library like wxWindows or qt, the code you write in Visual Studio is likely to be portable, but those libs are not in themselves part of the suite

And I don't think COM components can be considered portable. My version of Visual Studio only output x86 code.

use gcc it is the best undoubted

Quote:
On 2002-09-02 07:13, dxprog wrote:
I use lcc, which is a Windows based gcc, and is also free.



Me too. [addsig]