Re: Difference between VC++ and UNIX

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:17:09 -0500, mschaef@xxxxxxxxxxxx (MSCHAEF.COM)
wrote:

In article <et2m92lo7nuqlfms3kk7mp7jo2qmc1akor@xxxxxxx>,
Al Balmer <alremovebalmerthis@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 14:58:22 -0500, mschaef@xxxxxxxxxxx (MSCHAEF.COM)
wrote:

In article <torl92p7dra4mrb833c1onffhj0s94fjdf@xxxxxxx>,
Al Balmer <alremovebalmerthis@xxxxxxx> wrote:
..
Some non-Microsoft tools are even nicer. For example, Visual Slickedit
will do all that you mention and more, for many more languages, is
cheaper than MSVC++,

Maybe not the cheaper part. Visual SlickEdit for Windows is $284 and
doesn't seem to include a compiler.

It uses whatever compiler you have, in whatever language you like. GCC
seems to be the most popular.

I guess that's part of the problem: if you don't like a free compiler,
you're buying both a compiler and an editor seperately. That makes the
price argument somewhat less compelling. That's all I was trying to say.

VisualStudio Express is free, and
it does. (Even for commercial use)

What is Visual Studio Express?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/

It seeems like Microsoft's latest attempt to retain the mind share of
more grassroots developers.

Interesting. I haven't been keeping up. "Lightweight, easy-to-use, and
easy-to-learn tools for the hobbyist, novice, and student developer."
The Express editions seem to be quite good, actually. Extensibility
isn't good, and some useful features are omitted, but for free, it
looks really good. I wonder if the optimization is the same as the Pro
edition? Sometimes "entry" editions cut back on optimization.

Visual Studio Professional lists at
over $800, and runs on only one platform, but does support more than
one language.

Well... it supports a few, but not as many as a good editor like Emacs,
or vi and SlickEdit, I presume. I totally gave up trying to do things
like edit Lisp or integrate 3rd party compilers into Visual Studio.

and is available on many platforms. I have it for
Windows, HP-UX, and Linux.

Multiplatform is $799. That's enough money to buy a Windows box just
to run that free copy of Visual Studio.

It's not enough to buy a Windows box, a Linux box, an HP-UX box, and
pay Microsoft to port their product to those platforms. (What I'm
trying to say is that's a silly comparison.)

Oh, of course!!! I agree with you when you look at it that way. However,
that assumes that you need your full envirionment hosted on all your
target platforms. If you're running on Windows anyway, I'm just
arguing that it might make sense to develop with Visual Studio
and use other tools on your other platforms, which presumably will
get less use. It's a pretty personal thing, but if one was committed
to Visual Studio...

<G> Actually, the other platforms get far more use. Maybe 5% of my
development work is for Windows.

Some differences are strictly personal - I hate vi's modes, for
example.

Me too. My favorite vi command is :q!, which thanks to Mr. Heathfield,
I now know is actually an ex command.

That's the first one to learn, since it lets you get out of anything
you've screwed up.

Does Visual Studio run in a Cygwin bash box?

Yes. Cygwin basically means this: POSIX emulation library for windows +
a bunch of free software compiled to use it. Unlike Wine, a part of which
tries to run actual PE executable files on Linux, Cygwin doesn't attempt
to run foreign executables on Windows. All the cygwin tools are standard
PE .exe files, which can be launched by bash, so devenv /build should
work from a bash prompt as well as a cmd prompt.

I suppose it would -
Slickedit does, and that gives access to a lot of the unix type
goodies on Windows. How customizable is Visual Studio, when it comes
to adding commands, menus, etc?

How much do you like Visual BASIC? Rebinding keys and rearranging menus
is pretty easy. So are simple customizatoins like font changes and the
like. However, if you want to write custom commands, etc., that pretty
much means VBA and the Visual Studio object model. It's apparantly
pretty comprehensive if you can stomach it (which I can't... I tend
to do really serious editing in Emacs and Emacs Lisp).

My one experience with VBA was writing an Excel extension which
collected data via DDE from a programmable logic controller for
display and some simple calculations. I had to work around things like
it raising the "data acquired" flag before the data was actually ready
to manipulate. I'm glad I never had to do anything else with it.

Slickedit's programming language is very much like C (probably why
it's called Slick-C <g>). I find the easiest way to do something
clever is to approximate it as a keyboard macro, which is stored as
Slick-C, then go in and edit it to do exactly what I want. It can then
be left as just another command, or added to a menu or toolbar.

Slickedit isn't the only good modern program editor, but most of the
others are single-platform, and this is the one I've become used to
over the last 6 years. It does lots of stuff I never use - automatic
refactoring in Java and C++, for example. One beef I have, which I
could fix if I were ambitious enough - it uses the same lexer for both
C and C++. The developers aren't interested in maintaining separate
lexers, but I find it annoying that a variable named "class" is
treated as a keyword.

--
Al Balmer
Sun City, AZ
.

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