[nycbug-talk] hand wringing

[Bob Ippolito]

On May 2, 2004, at 6:09 PM, pete at nomadlogic.org wrote:

>> Have YOU used Visual Studio .NET?  I'm not often a windows developer,
>> but when I am, it sure beats the hell out of the gcc toolchain for 
>> most
>> things.
>
> i thought Visual Studio .NET was an IDE with the windows compiler
> intergrated into it.  and if i'm not mistaken, gcc stands for Gnu 
> Compiler
> Collection which is not an IDE.

The IDE and debugger in VS.NET, in my experience, is much more feature 
complete and reliable than anything equivalent in the open source 
world.  Someone highly experienced in something like Emacs or Eclipse 
can probably achieve the same or better productivity for writing 
regular 'ol code, but there's one heck of a learning curve.  What most 
people probably miss about the VS.NET IDE at first glance is the 
integration with their other stuff: debugging/developing SQL Server 
databases and stored procedures, local and remote debugging of IIS (and 
other COM/DCOM type environments), JScript debugging, etc.

Microsoft's compilers are more efficient and produce more efficient 
code than GCC on x86.  The C++ 'support' is a little different, but 
most people avoid doing the sort of magic that breaks or otherwise 
confuses C++ compilers.  g++ is not perfect either, I've seen correct 
C++ code cause g++ to segfault.

That said, I'm mostly just playing devil's advocate here.  I do most of 
my development these days on OS X (targeting several platforms, but 
sometimes just OS X) with Python, GCC, Vim and Xcode/Interface 
Builder.. but I've used Microsoft's tools and they are much better than 
any of you are giving them credit for when you're developing for their 
platform with their technologies.  It's pretty much the same story with 
Apple's tools, but in many cases they're just lipstick on a pig 
(gcc/gdb).  Compilation is slow, it produces slow code (in comparison 
to CodeWarrior or XL), and the debugger in Xcode is just a frontend to 
GDB so it can be expected to crash or produce incorrect results once 
you start using any of its advanced features.

-bob