In article <4ivauu$oda at news-f.iadfw.net>, aimania at airmail.net says...
>>mangalam at uci.edu (Harry Mangalam) wrote:
>>>(altho, some would say that GNU is better than commercial quality :)
>I've used both GNU C and Microsoft Visual C++ and although GNU C was
>faster than Microsoft when they only had a 16 bit version, Microsoft
>is now faster than GNU C and there debugger is unbelievable.
I don't see the relevance.
MS VC++ will not run on a Linux/unix box. This is the prime
consideration. Its not just gcc that is the item under
consideration but also the operating system, X-windows etc.
Also, MS C++ is far from being freeware and is much less debugged
than gcc (even MS admit this, they "unofficially" debug things after
they have sold them) so I'm not sure that I'd trust it just yet and
I don't have the cash to spare for the "upgrades" that will be
necessary as their operating systems change.
GNU is here to stay, MS could change direction completely
tomorrow so code written for gcc should always work. If generous
people hand out scientific software written in nice code then I've
also no need of a debugger, no matter how unbelievable. On the
other hand, if the same generous people make executables for DOS/Win
or whatever available I don't really care what compiler they've used
as I don't have to compile it myself (even if slowly).
I believe that the comment in the original post referred to
gcc versus "native" cc.
Bernard
Bernard Murray, Ph.D.
bernard at elsie.nci.nih.gov (National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda MD, USA)
