[nycbug-talk] hand wringing

[Pete Wright]

Bob Ippolito wrote:

>
> 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.
>
that's really interesting, i spend most of my time being a sys admin and 
have always had problems debugging running systems on Win32 compared to 
unix.  that is obviously coming from a different perspective than a 
programmer tho...

> 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.

yea no wonder so many people use QT etc...

>
> 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.
>
that's really interesting.  i've been very interested in Xcode, but have 
not had a chance to check it out.  what other alternative compilers 
could apple use to get away from gcc?  does ibm produce a compiler that 
apple could adopt on the ppc64 chip?


-pete