Re: Compiler for C++ programming
"James Kanze" <james.kanze@gmail.com>
On Sep 10, 11:37 pm, Jerry Coffin <jerryvcof...@yahoo.com>
[ this group is always worth reading for Jerry... :) ]
There aren't very many C++ compilers around, at least that
anybodys really trying to keep current. The obvious candidates
on Windows are MS, Intel, Comeau, and g++. At least for
conformance, Comeau is pretty clearly the best, though Intel
is a close second. The best you could even hope to claim for
g++ is that while it's in last place, it's not really _much_
worse than VC++.
....
Dev-C++ has rather different problems. If you get it with a
compiler, you get g++ 3.4.2 -- roughly five years old, and no
longer competitive. The look and feel of the IDE appear to be
based on Borland's -- from about 20 years ago. Calling them
dated and clunky is a compliment. The editor is downright
primitive, without even so much as the ability to search for a
regular expression. When I was writing Fortran IV on a Control
Data mainframe, I had an editor more capable than this...
Which raises the question: should an IDE even have its own
editor?
Sure, that's why it is callet *I*DE ;-) but the user-friendliest one would
allow to replace the whole editor, or make it extremely tune-able.
I use vim pretty much everywhere as my editor, and in
practice, about the only thing I've seen that an IDE brings,
Well, you say moving to Win development, If you invest into using VS, I'd be
very interested to read opinion half or one year from now, and how much you
want vim back. (which certainly has a deal of good features in ctags
support, but ways less than possible and good to use...)
compared with vim and a command interpreter, is context
sensitive help.
Which (BAH), worked well in MS stuff perfectly until version 5.0 and sinks
ever since, I wonder if for VS2010 they discover new ways to spoil it even
further. :-(((
It used to find exactly what is needed -- now it takes a year to start,
searches for another two years locally and on several net sources (that can
be restricted to local, but then mine just found nothing anymore...) and
will jump to irrelevant occurances of the word you launched it on, without
any reasonable way to know where you are, and how to get to the rest of the
results...
Guess I as the last mohican to ever use F1 for anything, so no one noticed
the situation.
And the Unix based IDE's that I've used have
always treated the editor as a plug-in component, so that I
could use vim with them as well (and my collegues could use
emacs).
To me the editor itself is pretty arbitrary, the IDE is good for saving much
time in navigation and code reading by showing call/caller graphs, use
locations, definition (it is ways superior to just grep-ing) ,
active/passive #if blocks, certainly at compiling auto-navigating to error
lines in all involved files.
Recently I also discovered the convenience of the 'edit-and-continue'
debugger. Generally I am pretty light on debugging, and in case of a
problem did not need much more than the stop location, or a going some
frames up.
But in a recent work I made an IEEE 11073-20601 protocol implementation,
with all kind of imaginable problems both in sent packets and their
interpretation code -- it saved a big deal of time that I could walk through
a whole case fixing data and code as needed without starting over the
equipment sending new packets with a single spot fixed...
Being able to sensibly organize all the source file windows you work with,
and the various auxillary windows/toolbars is also a good thing.
Too bad that in version 9, approaching 20 years of development VS still has
stupid bugs rendering whole features crap (i.e. 'Task list' picks duplicated
and multiplied items, lacks correct ordering and fails prev/next navigaton;
the code browser still does not show the compiler-created functions, and
does not use compiation info for everything it should; intellisense has no
manual control...) and I recall at least two IDE crashes.