Re: Compiler for C++ programming
On Sep 10, 11:37 pm, Jerry Coffin <jerryvcof...@yahoo.com> wrote:
In article <4aa94164$0$2203$a729d...@news.telepac.pt>,
rui.mac...@gmail.com says...
Jerome wrote:
Which compiler would be good to learn C++ template
programming, on windows platform. I have access to VC++,
but I have read that VC++ does not provide the STL library
as per the C++ STL standards. If the above is true then
which would be the ideal compiler to use.
GCC is your friend, as it's not only (arguably) the best C++
compiler out there but it's also free/open source software.
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++.
OTOH, unless you're dealing with really obscure code, they
difference between the best and the worst is pretty minimal,
so g++ is still perfectly usable.
Obscure is in the eyes of the beholder. VC++ supports Unicode
in symbols, g++ doesn't. Comeau, and I think Intel, support
export, which neither VC++ nor g++ does; if you're doing any
serious programming with templates, that could be an important
plus.
By other measures, g++ generally does pretty poorly as well.
You can generally figure that executables it produces will be
at least twice the size of those from VC++, and often three or
four times as big. The code can be competitive in terms of
speed, but again, that usually translates to "last place, but
fairly close to the others". Of course, that depends somewhat
on the version of the compiler involved as well -- they
overhauled the whole optimizer section for (IIRC) version 4.
It now has what's supposed to be a very general framework for
all kinds of optimization code, but (at least IME) still
doesn't produce as fast of code as the older compilers did.
But it's still fast enough for most applications. On Sparc, any
time we weren't bound by third party libraries, we'd use g++,
rather than Sun CC, despite the fact that g++ generated code was
slower.
There are also a hefty number of free/open source IDEs for
windows that support GCC, such as Dev-C++ and Code::Blocks.
I'd have a hard time recommending either of those.
For Code::Blocks, the installation is rather problematic --
not terrible, but (basically) unless you've installed gcc
exactly where it expects, it probably won't find it -- but
it'll still treat gcc as the default compiler, so attempts at
compiling will do nothing -- not even show an error message to
warn you that it didn't work at all. It also seems to pretty
much require that you've successfully installed the compiler
first, and that can be non-trivial. On the good side, at least
once you've gotten it installed and working, it does work
reasonably well.
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? I use vim pretty much everywhere as my editor, and in
practice, about the only thing I've seen that an IDE brings,
compared with vim and a command interpreter, is context
sensitive help. 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).
--
James Kanze