Rick Campbell writes: I'm not excatly sure *what* you're saying here - are you referring to ANSI C, or ANSI C++ (or ANSI Common Lisp? Nah...) For what it's worth, the compiler in Visual C++ has a number of severe bugs/shortcomings. For instance, at warning level 3 (the highest level recommended for normal use) the compiler does not catch the following typo: foo::iterator it; for (it = mycollection.begin; ...) // should be mycollection.begin() The libraries, likewise (Visual C++ 5.0 shipped with a severely broken STL). The integrated environment is even worse; they even *default* to saying that the Tab spacing is 4 characters! Seems to work for Microsoft :-) //Raymond.

From: N J Doye <nic(a)niss.ac.uk&gt; Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 09:31:15 +0000 (GMT) (Apologies for Off-topicness) Are you talking about Sparcworks 4.2 or the new (unreleased) 5.0? I'm talking about 4.2. I only have access to the released products, with Sun or Microsoft, and can't imagine arguing for going into production using a beta compiler. When's 5.0 due? Have they finally added things like STL, standard header files, bool, optional template parameters, etc., etc.? Rick

Rick> Rick Campbell <rick(a)campbellcentral.org&gt; writes: Rick> However you forget that with modern libc it is close to impossible to Rick> static link. c.f. Solaris. Rick> Well, actually I didn't forget it exactly, but I did conveniently Rick> forget to mention it :-) Still, wherever possible, one should Rick> statically link for network distribution. Rick> As far as I can tell, while Sun is fighting Microsoft in the public Rick> arena, their technical decisions are some of the biggest reasons Rick> around for switching to the dark side, er, NT. I'm not sure that even There are people at Sun who have built careers out of transitioning reluctant users from static to dynamic linking. At least for libraries like libc, I agree with them. The real question is whether you consider libc or system calls the real interface to the operating system. I vote for libc. Rick> HPs C++ compiler is as bad as Sun's is these days. It's really kind Rick> of embarrassing to have to have a zillion backward compatibility hacks Rick> so that code that works with all of the ANSI compatibility that comes Rick> with Visual C++ can still deal with something as archaic as Rick> Sparcworks(*). Meanwhile all their C++ effort seems to be in building Rick> a friggin graphical development environment. Like, someone should Rick> tell them that you're supposed to get the core functionality in place Rick> before you starting playing with the bells and whistles. Jeez. Rick> (*) Wherever possible, I try to use egcs, but too many management Rick> types prefer to pay tens of thousands of dollars per license per year Rick> for an inferior product because high quality open source products make Rick> them nervous. Go figure. With respect to C, the Sparcworks compiler is the most reliable compiler I have ever used. GCC has been far worse in terms of numbers of raw bugs encountered. I've rewritten major chunks of XEmacs to avoid using buggy gcc features. Dunno about C++. Martin (who did not get paid for writing this)