[nycbug-talk] hand wringing

[Bob Ippolito]

On May 2, 2004, at 9:16 PM, Pete Wright wrote:

> 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...

That's something else entirely.  I'm not even sure I would call it 
debugging, but I can't think of a better word for it right now.

>> 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...

Which works perfectly well with many different compilers, including 
both MSVC and GCC, so obviously they aren't using the kind of magic I 
was talking about.  What's your point?

>> 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?

I highly doubt that Apple is going to license a compiler from anyone 
given the effort that they have put into GCC.  However, you can set up 
an Xcode project that uses an alternative compiler or different build 
process.  XL is IBM's compiler, by the way.  It is pretty badass (but 
expensive) for ppc64.

-bob