Author: Jon Dart
Date: 13:22:44 02/01/00
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The Professional version is (as the name indicates) what most professional Windows programmers use. It's not cheap but you can get it somewhat off list price if you shop around (e.g. http://www.pparadise.com has it for $479). You can get started with a less capable compiler but if you are a serious Windows programmer you will likely want to get this eventually. I have had a significant amount of trouble with the VC++ optimizer. Even with all the service packs installed, I have still seen cases where it generates bad code. It's not that you can't use it, but you may have to reduce the optimization level for parts of your code (with consequent loss in performance). You also get the fun of figuring out if your code is wrong or if the compiler is screwing it up :-). But you may or may not encounter this problem. An alternative is to use the Gnu C++ compiler, which is free, and now has reasonably good performance and stability. It has the additional advantage that you can pretty easily move code written with it to non-Microsoft environments (e.g. Linux). However, I wouldn't recommend Gnu C++ for a novice or beginning C++ programmer, as you will probably not find at easy to use as the Microsoft environment. --Jon On February 01, 2000 at 12:22:02, Mike Carter wrote: >I started writing a Visual Basic chess program but have decided to migrate to >C++. Checking out Microsoft compilers, the Enterprise version of 6.0 seems to >be overkill (and at $1300 out of price range!). Microsoft's Standard version of >C++ 6.0 is about $100 and the Professional version is $550. Assuming I'm using >this to write chess code exclusively, is the extra $450 justified to move up to >Professional? Or is another company (e.g. Borland) a better choice/value? (If >it matters, I have a Pentium II 400 MHz with 128Mb RAM and would eventually like >to port the program to WinBoard). Many thanks in advance for your opinion! > >Mike Carter (MrMike on ICC) >mcarter@tdi.net
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