Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 08:47:02 02/02/00
Go up one level in this thread
On February 01, 2000 at 16:22:44, Jon Dart wrote: >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. It's not everywhere that expensive. Some companies have it under a license, perhaps a company you work for! If you're student, or working at a school somehow then it's also very cheap. >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 First of all, the servicepacks didn't seem to change the compiler at all here, only the IDE. Secondly, the better a compiler optimizes, the more assumptions it has to take, the more assumptions it makes, the bigger the chance that if there is something broken in your code that it crashes you. Initially i had the same problem too, but when i started SMP programming, then visual c++ appeared the best compiler of them all. No volatile problems at all i had. functions like clock() work correctly etcetera. Excellent help files and most improtant: what the help file says is usually true. Very important also: a lot of examples get shipped with it. Most important: it's producing the fastest code! >you can't use it, but you may have to reduce the optimization >level for parts of your code (with consequent loss in there are major bugs in your code then. it's not easy to fix a bug, but sometimes you must do it! >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. In case of visual i have not seen a single compiler problem so far. >An alternative is to use the Gnu C++ compiler, which is free, and very hard to take serious under windows. for linux it's the only compiler you can use (apart from some gnu clones). it is NOT EASY to use. you must figure everything out or know someone who knows a solution to what function you're looking for. Bad documented. messy documented, not a nice MSDN feature where you just click and type the word and you get examples and everything. >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). well one note, you need at least gcc 2.95.2, everything before 2.95 was big crap. What i find weird is that a 486 code generating compiler (visual c++) is 8% faster for DIEP than gcc 2.96 (latest snapshot), which has IA-32 with PII instructions implemented. >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. setting up linux with redhat 6.1 is however a lot easier nowadays. It looks alot better. I'm really waiting to get also a good optimizing compiler now for it. It seems however that no one of the gcc team is getting paid, so i think we can wait forever for that... >--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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