Borland Builder C++ v.6 or Microsoft Visual C++ ?

[Mark - KF8RV]

Which to purchase is the question.

My Borland 4.5 C/C++ compiler is old. The personal or student version of
either BBC++ or MVC++ is being investigated for home use. My personal
preference happens to be Borland, which I am not able to purchase wisely due to
a lack of product knowledge. You can bombard me with good suggestions,
including a solid reference book on your compiler of choice.

Thank you.

Mark.

 

[Sharad Kala]

Which to purchase is the question.

My Borland 4.5 C/C++ compiler is old. The personal or student version of
either BBC++ or MVC++ is being investigated for home use. My personal
preference happens to be Borland, which I am not able to purchase wisely due to
a lack of product knowledge. You can bombard me with good suggestions,
including a solid reference book on your compiler of choice.

It's a good idea to purchase compilers but if it's just for sheer academic
purposes then why not download a free compiler ? VC ++ 2003 Toolkit is free
for download and pretty good. Else you could also get g++ (3.3.3??) on
Cygwin.

Sharad

 

[Pete]

I like VC++ 2003 Standard (~$100), in combination with the free VC++ Toolkit
2003, which includes an optimizing version of the Standard compiler
(identical to the Pro edition's). If you don't want to pay for an IDE, just
the Toolkit is excellent on its own with a good text editor.

I can't stand Borland stuff.

- Pete

 

[Peter Nolan]

Hi Mark,
I'm not sure if anyone has told you that VC++.NET is VERY different to
what you would call C++.

You can write C++ inside VC++.NET by not taking advantage of any .net
features which is what I do......but it still takes some concentration
and attention to not accidentally use a vc++.net only feature because
(surprise, surprise) the vs.net on-line help can be a bit vague about
what exactly is ansi standard C++ and what is not...;-)...My software
runs on win32, AIX, Solaris with only one image of the source code.
MSFT say .net code will run on any platform at some point in the
future. (We shall see.)

I decided to use VC++ 6.0 for my development and went from 6.0 to .net
when .net became available. Why? I think Bill will win the compiler
arguement on win. Already Oracle does not support Borland for C++
access to Oracle for C++/Pro or whatever it is that accesses Oracle for
the pre-compiler. I stopped using that about 2 years ago.

I really, really like the IDE in VS.NET. Though I have nothing else to
compare it to as I never did any other C++ development on any other
IDE....(When I first did C in 1985 there was no such thing as an
IDE...)

The book I used to teach myself C++ was by Kris Jamsa:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...07/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/102-2914984-9672955


I really liked it as I had to learn C++ as well...I only had C
previously (and many other languages but not C++).

Other people bag the book but it has the best description I found of
what C++ actually is for someone who is only C. I found I 'got it' in
about 30 minutes as opposed to reading VC++ 6.0 Unleashed for weeks on
end and being none the wiser.....that 30 minutes was worth 10x the
price of the book. It has an example for everything I have ever wanted
to do...the only thing I did not find was how to perform memory mapped
IO on windows, and that's because it is a winAPI that must be
called.....If I only had USD50 and could only buy one book, this would
be it.

If you want to learn C++ and learn about cross platform code I suggest
you take a wander over to http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html and
download ACE. There is about a zillion lines of code that does some
pretty useful stuff. There is even a book as a programmers guide. I
only heard about it recently and I am only scratching ther surface of
what it does...I plan to incorporate ACE functions into my software.

Also, take a wander through sourceforge.net and codeproject.com as you
will find lots and lots of code there that does useful stuff to sharpen
your skills on. Being something of an 'old timer' I think it's just
fantatstic that there are so many pieces of code out there to go and
check out when I am trying to do something I have never done before...
Best Regards

Peter Nolan
www.peternolan.com

 

[RCS]

Which to purchase is the question.

My Borland 4.5 C/C++ compiler is old. The personal or student version of
either BBC++ or MVC++ is being investigated for home use. My personal
preference happens to be Borland, which I am not able to purchase wisely due to
a lack of product knowledge. You can bombard me with good suggestions,
including a solid reference book on your compiler of choice.

Thank you.

Mark.

If it's the IDE you are concerned about, in my opinion both suck big time!

Two years ago I ditched the Visual C++ (7.0) IDE in the garbage, only
kept the compiler, and am using GNU make for all my C++ stuff.

Sounds primitive?

Once you grasp the powerful, flexible approach of make files instead of
hunting down places to set compiler directives and linker directives for
every freaking project in that horrible Visual C++ IDE, it's like having
a shower after a sweaty, stinking day at work.

Just my pennies worth of advice!

RCS

 

[Peter Nolan]

Hi RCS,
actually, I agree that there are just too many places to set things in
the IDE compile options and I wish it were easier......though 'make'
has become much more complex than it used to be when I used it (20
years ago)...it's like a programming language unto itself now....I was
trying to get my software to compile on AIX recently and it took 4
HOURS to get a make file to work and compile one program!!!!...Never
seen so much hyeroglyphics to compile a damn program!!!!!! The AIX guy
was typing all sorts of uncomprehensible stuff....and he never did get
it to work such that one make file compiled everything so I have a make
file for each program (not what I would call progress...) (Clearly I am
'make challenged'..;-) )

So with VS.NET I just to it the 'simple way' and put all my options on
for each sub project and issue rebuilds.....I don't think it's so
bad......it certainly get's me by....what I don't like about that is it
makes it difficult to manage multiple versions of the same software
because things like header libraries need to be defined in the projcts
etc....hhhmmmm....

Peter