Bearfruit

Hi David, good points. Here’s my thoughts on C++:

• It is fast. Microsoft’s C++ compiler spits out some screaming fast code.
• Microsoft’s build tools are also quite nice.
• Winforms is excellent and easy to use. Is it still called winforms now?
• Microsoft’s debugging capability is stunning

But when you leave the world of Visual Studio:

• You are probably going to the GNU toolchain, which to me, does not feel as fast
• You start to mess with Make files
• Your GUI toolkit is… ????
• Your debugging experience is < stunning

Then there’s always the pointers.

Please note that I learned C++ in college in ‘95 and we didn’t even have strings (my text book was “Moving From C to C++” by Greg Perry, published in 1992) except for character arrays.

Recently I did some experimenting with the CDT plugin for Eclipse and was very impressed. No more makefiles, assuming you use the managed environment. However debugging still didn’t work too well and there still isn’t a clear GUI toolkit to choose if you want to target users across multiple platforms.

I would prefer to write and maintain C++ code over C code though. Its just such a pain developing one app in Python or Java then switching to C and wishing you had more than a struct.