Whither Borland C++?
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S Douglas wrote:
Thought you where indicating you where up for a challenge?
I'm up for a PAID challenge.:) Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
Joe Woodbury wrote:
I'm up for a PAID challenge.
Aren’t we all? :) You could always buy Borland? Cant be that expensive any more, its been on the market now for how long with no bites (or at least no public bites)? :suss:
I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley: -- modified at 1:30 Saturday 10th June, 2006
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I meant simply that I would never choose to compete with MS on one of their core product lines.
Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:
I think MS could handle the competition, AND the public would benefit from the push for technologies at the same time. win win.
Yeah, the only losers would be the people that MS would, over time, crush into the dirt. Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++
Christian Graus wrote:
Jeffry J. Brickley wrote: "I think MS could handle the competition, AND the public would benefit from the push for technologies at the same time. win win." Yeah, the only losers would be the people that MS would, over time, crush into the dirt.
Micro$oft has always been hard to compete with...just look at all those companies they've squashed over the years, and many more that they are continuing to crush with their monopoly (M$ + DELL, M$ + HP, etc)...like a semi running everyone off the road...it's just a matter of time. The software/hardware monopoly is like a well oiled machine, pretty hard to beat unless you have a decent customer base and a totally different platform. And it seems like even that isn't working too well anymore... RIP Apple :(( (keep in mind this is comming from a graphic designer, not lazy user) I think Steve is gonna drive it into the ground pretty soon, its the begining of an end :sigh: I miss their golden days...the iMacs...the blue-and-white G3s...then the later model desktops and powerbooks like the one I've got, a 500Mhz G4 Titanium with a CD/RW and 256MB RAM (needs a new mainboard...i think someone shorted out a trace when the feds siezed it for data analysis, but that's pretty much all i know of its history from before i bought it). I have to say its maybe of the last of the good machines they've made before the infamous 'switch that has taken them a few steps too close to being just another brand of PC...first its the IBM chip and a poorly-coded 'X (don't you just love those kernel panics :rolleyes: ) and now Intel. To me personally they are dead now. And I don't recognize the iPod and don't own one. After all, it doesn't have that Apple "chime" that has for years brought a smile to my face every time my machines powered on... Sorry about my sour mood...i just wish my Macs didn't need over $300 worth of parts to get them back together...but for now i have a few windows/linux boxes which need some repairs as well but run with their guts all pulled out. But back to the subject of Microsoft. I have to say that too many other companies have adopted their strategy nowadays and it keeps getting harder for the smaller business to stay afloat. I mean now we have corporate america feeding on the corpses of those whose jobs were stolen from them in favor of outsourcing, often without regard to the years of work they put in and their devotion to the job. It's all money money money, their bottom
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Joe Woodbury wrote:
I loved Turbo C
Ah those were the days :) (Ctrl-F9 to run and F10 to step IIRC)
**You know you're obsessed with computer graphics when you're outside and you look up at the trees and think, "Wow! That's spectacular resolution!"
**I love Borland C too ;) I've got my hands on the Borland C/C++ 3.1 in my 2nd year of college, that day and today I live in C language. Borland C rocks for students :cool: If Borland can make it open source, I can bet that more than 50% of the world's programmers will contribute to make their "Mother IDE" more powerfull than Micrsoft! --------------------------- My logic is undeniable (V.I.K.I, I.Robot) » http://www.idlsol.com
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VC6 was a terrible C++ implimentation. VC2005 is an excellent one, in fact, it's been great since 2002. Sure, the IDE support is not up to the C# editor, but who would buy Borland C++ with the goal of competing with Microsoft ? Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++
Christian Graus wrote:
VC6 was a terrible C++ implimentation. VC2005 is an excellent one, in fact, it's been great since 2002. Sure, the IDE support is not up to the C# editor, but who would buy Borland C++ with the goal of competing with Microsoft ?
Huh. I didn't notice that much of a difference, though I was working in MFC. The only improvement I noticed was instead of VC putting in #ifndef/#define/#endif markers around all headers, it just put in "#pragma once". Much cleaner. I found the IDE in VC 2003 to be worse than VC6. I was used to Class Wizard. Then they took it out with no helpful documentation on where I could find substitute functions. I found that the combo box control was very different and cumbersome for some reason. Maybe my memory is bad on the way it used to work. I've worked on VC++ projects off and on from 2000 up to a few months ago. I used VC6 for all but one of them. I told my boss that if and when he assigns me another VC++ (native compilation) project I'd prefer to work on it in VC6. VC 2003 was too much of an adjustment. Even though Class Wizard was a departure from the design of Microsoft's other developer tools, the tools that VC6 had seemed well suited to the way C++ worked. The way they did it in 2003 felt like they were shoehorning C++ into the IDE. Not pretty. Giving credit where it's due, the VS IDE works great for C# and VB.Net. Re: who would buy it? I think you're right in more ways than one. Their dev tools are competing with Microsoft's on the one hand, and against open source dev tools, like Eclipse from IBM. Borland (or I guess they've called themselves Enprise since years ago, yes?) should probably do what other software companies have done with failing products: open source it. There's little potential to profit from it. So just acknowledge it and get on with life. Mark Miller Software Developer -- modified at 22:11 Saturday 10th June, 2006
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Christian Graus wrote:
who would buy Borland C++ with the goal of competing with Microsoft
A bunch of C++ fanatics?:) It is a money making business, but clearly not enough for Borland to keep it going (I don't blame them.) Plus, it would be nice to have a product that competed with Microsoft at some level. My own idea is to add really good integrated ATL WTL support to Borland C++ and to also include a full UI library like CodeJock as part of the package. Again, I'm under no illusion this would make anyone rich, it would just be fun as heck to work on. (I'd also simplify and improve BDE.) (EDIT: There is still an awful lot of Delphi code out there that needs to be supported. Perhaps Delphi .NET [yeah, I shuddered too writing that] could be added to the suite.) Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke -- modified at 22:36 Thursday 8th June, 2006
Joe Woodbury wrote:
(EDIT: There is still an awful lot of Delphi code out there that needs to be supported. Perhaps Delphi .NET [yeah, I shuddered too writing that] could be added to the suite.)
I thought Borland had come out with Delphi.Net a couple years ago or something. Mark Miller Software Developer
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Christian Graus wrote:
Last time I looked at hte Borland tools, they were way behind VS, no matter how bad the C++ VS is compared to C#. To beat MS would take a lot of investment.
Were I in charge of the Borland products, my goal wouldn't be to beat MS, but to complement them and fill those niches Microsoft no longer wants to fill. For example, one thing lacking in Visual C++ is fully integrated support for WTL. From a practical standpoint, Microsoft's interest in C++ is mainly internal, but also to appear legitimate to the larger development community. Their support for C++ is clearly half-hearted, despite the attempts of many very dedicated Microsoft employees. I may gripe about this, but I fully understand it; Microsoft's largest revenue stream is supporting corporate environments. (We C++ guys may mock VBers, but I'm quite sure VB ultimately made more far money for Microsoft than VC++. The same goes for .NET.) I'd even go so far as to suggest that if Microsoft dropped support for C++ in the next release of Visual Studio, there would be a lot of noise, but not much else. PS. I'll go way out on a limb and suggest that at the highest levels of management Microsoft very seriously considered not including C++ support in Visual Studio 2005. This, I believe, is why the support for C++ is so half-baked. (I actually wish they'd just done a VS2003 service pack with the new compiler and the few additions/modifications to MFC/ATL/WTL/STL.) Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
I admit I haven't looked at it yet. From what I've read, they've improved Managed C++ (what people now are calling "C++/CLR") a lot. There was an implementation of Managed C++ in VS 2002/2003 that was not nearly as good. Natively compiled C++ is another matter. Since I have not looked at it nor read about support for it in VS 2005, I have no basis on which to judge it. I agree though that since .Net came out Microsoft's public support of C++ has really withered. I guess it always was a step-child in the VS toolset, but with the way things have been going it appears to be almost forgotten. This doesn't mean there won't be native APIs in Vista for the new features. Last I've heard there will be. It's just that since .Net has come out, Microsoft hardly talks about anything else. I remember going to a DevDays symposium on .Net back in 2001. They asked "How many VB coders are out there?" There were probably a couple thousand people in auditorium. Probably 99% of the hands went up. "How many C++ coders are there?" I and about 3 other people raised their hands. "How many Java coders?" I think about the same number went up. I had heard that VB was dominant on the Windows platform, but I had no idea it was that large! Since they talked about features that were coming in the new version of VS, and had talked a bit about new features in MFC, I asked a few C++ feature questions of one of the presenters. He basically told me he didn't know and he didn't care. He said "I use .Net whenever I can. And I avoid MFC." Probably the reason they've put effort into improving Managed C++ is to bring all developers into the .Net fold. Plus they may figure they'll be able to use it someday to port their older products to the runtime. I really doubt Microsoft will be getting rid of VC++ anytime soon, but it's clearly legacy to them. So many of their products still use it, but most of the dev tool effort is going into .Net. Mark Miller Software Developer
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In February, Borland announced it was selling the IDE unit. It appears no purchase has been made, does anyone know anything different? (I think it would be fun to work on it. I loved Turbo C and would love to make Borland C++ be as slick as that product was [I last used Borland C++ extensively with 4.5 and it was horribly buggy. I briefly used 5.01? and it seemed improved, but the project was cancelled before I discovered anything more.]) Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
Just trying to point out some misconceptions: At a recent meeting a Borland representative gave us some interesting information about what is going on. Apparently there were more than 40 interested parties in the "DevCo" tools (which include Delphi, C++, C#, JBuilder, ...) and in the past months these have been short listed to "a handful". So there is certainly no shortage of interest and it is expected that the ultimately lucky buyer/investor will be selected in "a couple of months". The Borland people who are staying with the DevCo products are all very positive about separating the dev tools from the ALM tools because it will allow them to focus much more on those tools (technically, financially and marketing-wise) than before and that should guarantee DevCo a better future than if it where still tied to the ALM stuff. And why would you create development tools that compete with Microsoft’s? You probably wouldn't ask if you had used them! Apart from a couple of misses tools like Delphi have been consistently better in many ways than the corresponding Microsoft tools. Many of the "exciting new features" in VS 2002/3/5 had already been around in Delphi for many years. Ever since Microsoft’s started working on .NET, much of its roadmap has looked like a Delphi (existing) feature list. And if you were wondering about what ALM means, just think Team System, but in mature products that been around for years now. Microsoft main claim to making "the best" development tools relies on bringing out another version of .NET at the same time so that they are the only ones offering support for the platform (at least for a while). But at the same time they immediately drop support for any previous versions of .NET (e.g. VS 2005 does not create .NET 1.1 apps), rather than showing any responsibility for and commitment to the stuff they did “last year”. Contrast this with Delphi which, although it hasn’t caught up with .NET 2 yet, at least supports both Win 32 and .NET 1.1 out of the same IDE, even to the extent that legacy Win32 source code can be compiled to NET 1.1 assemblies if you want to. VB6 programmers can feel free to start crying now … Alex
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Joe Woodbury wrote:
I'm up for a PAID challenge.
Aren’t we all? :) You could always buy Borland? Cant be that expensive any more, its been on the market now for how long with no bites (or at least no public bites)? :suss:
I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley: -- modified at 1:30 Saturday 10th June, 2006
S Douglas wrote:
You could always buy Borland?
I'm quite sure the buying price is in the tens of millions of dollars. Delphi, especially, is still quite popular. Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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S Douglas wrote:
You could always buy Borland?
I'm quite sure the buying price is in the tens of millions of dollars. Delphi, especially, is still quite popular. Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
Joe Woodbury wrote:
I'm quite sure the buying price is in the tens of millions of dollars
Sorry I forgot the [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] tags there.
Joe Woodbury wrote:
Delphi, especially, is still quite popular
Serious question (for once, I know it’s a stretch but one a month isn’t bad): What markets are they still dominate in? Or perhaps more correctly where is Delphi still being used heavily?
I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley:
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Christian Graus wrote:
VC6 was a terrible C++ implimentation. VC2005 is an excellent one, in fact, it's been great since 2002. Sure, the IDE support is not up to the C# editor, but who would buy Borland C++ with the goal of competing with Microsoft ?
Huh. I didn't notice that much of a difference, though I was working in MFC. The only improvement I noticed was instead of VC putting in #ifndef/#define/#endif markers around all headers, it just put in "#pragma once". Much cleaner. I found the IDE in VC 2003 to be worse than VC6. I was used to Class Wizard. Then they took it out with no helpful documentation on where I could find substitute functions. I found that the combo box control was very different and cumbersome for some reason. Maybe my memory is bad on the way it used to work. I've worked on VC++ projects off and on from 2000 up to a few months ago. I used VC6 for all but one of them. I told my boss that if and when he assigns me another VC++ (native compilation) project I'd prefer to work on it in VC6. VC 2003 was too much of an adjustment. Even though Class Wizard was a departure from the design of Microsoft's other developer tools, the tools that VC6 had seemed well suited to the way C++ worked. The way they did it in 2003 felt like they were shoehorning C++ into the IDE. Not pretty. Giving credit where it's due, the VS IDE works great for C# and VB.Net. Re: who would buy it? I think you're right in more ways than one. Their dev tools are competing with Microsoft's on the one hand, and against open source dev tools, like Eclipse from IBM. Borland (or I guess they've called themselves Enprise since years ago, yes?) should probably do what other software companies have done with failing products: open source it. There's little potential to profit from it. So just acknowledge it and get on with life. Mark Miller Software Developer -- modified at 22:11 Saturday 10th June, 2006
Without wanting to be rude, if your use of C++ was fairly shallow, or if you used the MFC containers (which seem OK if you haven't learned enough to know of the alternatives ), you probably wouldn't notice the difference.
ConsultNewbie wrote:
I found the IDE in VC 2003 to be worse than VC6. I was used to Class Wizard.
I never use the class wizard, I like to write my own code. But, I would agree that the jump was fairly major, because they made the IDE more like VB, because they united them all into one IDE. And the VB folks are hardest to teach, I guess....
ConsultNewbie wrote:
I'd prefer to work on it in VC6.
You should know that it's unsupported, and that you can't use the newer platform SDK's with it. Plus, the STL implimentation in VC2002 onwards is far better, and if you're going to use C++, you should learn how to use it. Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ Metal Musings - Rex and my new metal blog
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Joe Woodbury wrote:
I'm quite sure the buying price is in the tens of millions of dollars
Sorry I forgot the [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] tags there.
Joe Woodbury wrote:
Delphi, especially, is still quite popular
Serious question (for once, I know it’s a stretch but one a month isn’t bad): What markets are they still dominate in? Or perhaps more correctly where is Delphi still being used heavily?
I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley:
S Douglas wrote:
What markets are they still dominate in?
Delphi is a direct competitor of VB and is used heavily in the corporate environment. I wouldn't say Delphi ever "dominated" its market, but it has a strong following. (Personally, I've always hated Pascal so never got into Delphi.) One piece of trivia I just learned is that Anders Hejlsberg, key designer for C# was the architect of Delphi. Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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Without wanting to be rude, if your use of C++ was fairly shallow, or if you used the MFC containers (which seem OK if you haven't learned enough to know of the alternatives ), you probably wouldn't notice the difference.
ConsultNewbie wrote:
I found the IDE in VC 2003 to be worse than VC6. I was used to Class Wizard.
I never use the class wizard, I like to write my own code. But, I would agree that the jump was fairly major, because they made the IDE more like VB, because they united them all into one IDE. And the VB folks are hardest to teach, I guess....
ConsultNewbie wrote:
I'd prefer to work on it in VC6.
You should know that it's unsupported, and that you can't use the newer platform SDK's with it. Plus, the STL implimentation in VC2002 onwards is far better, and if you're going to use C++, you should learn how to use it. Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ Metal Musings - Rex and my new metal blog
No offense taken. A lot of the work I've done in C++ has been in MFC. I learned some C++ before getting into it, so I know about templates, and a bit about the more advanced features. In the course of my work the closest I got to using STL was the vector class (it makes a nice sequential/random-access container--better than MFC's). I'm an application developer. If VB 6 had been an object-oriented language I might've gone to it rather than C++. I prefer to not get close to the metal. I like getting into the more abstract levels like business rules, UI design, and such. There are plenty of just normal GUI apps. written in MFC, I'm guessing for performance reasons. Either that or the developer only knew (had respect for) C/C++ and so convinced their customer to let them develop it in that rather than VB. Since I work primarily in .Net now, I can have the best of both worlds, IMO: C++ syntax, which I'm familiar with, OOP, and the runtime and API handle some things for me that I used to have to worry about myself. I can focus more on the business problem.
Christian Graus wrote:
You should know that [VC6 is] unsupported, and that you can't use the newer platform SDK's with it. Plus, the STL implimentation in VC2002 onwards is far better
I know that VC6 is unsupported. I would guess the newer SDKs don't support it. In my experience MFC is legacy now, so I don't have to worry about getting into the newer APIs. I know they fixed some language bugs in VC7. Like you said I didn't get so deep into it that I would run into them. It's good to know the STL implementation is better now. The reason I said what I said is in VC6 I felt that the IDE supported my work better. It handled some of the "plumbing" (code generation) so I didn't have to, and the UI it used to present information and allow me to control things was concise. Don't get me wrong, the way they designed the IDE for VB was concise as well, but it just wasn't suited for C++. I loved the fact that if I wanted the IDE to do anything for me, I had only a few places I could go to have it do it: Class Wizard, the Resource Editor, or one of the project options dialogs (can't remember its name). The way they designed the IDE in VC7 was not as good. They took what used to be in these few spots and spread it all over the place. And, like I said, they provided no documentation to help former VC6 users adjust to the new layout. Maybe VC 2005 is better in this regard. When VC 2002/2003 came out, the compiler
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S Douglas wrote:
What markets are they still dominate in?
Delphi is a direct competitor of VB and is used heavily in the corporate environment. I wouldn't say Delphi ever "dominated" its market, but it has a strong following. (Personally, I've always hated Pascal so never got into Delphi.) One piece of trivia I just learned is that Anders Hejlsberg, key designer for C# was the architect of Delphi. Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
Joe Woodbury wrote:
is used heavily in the corporate environment. I wouldn't say Delphi ever "dominated" its market, but it has a strong following.
Ah, I see. That’s probably why there is so seemingly little information out on the net in regards to it.
Joe Woodbury wrote:
I've always hated Pascal so never got into Delphi.)
There is a free Pascal compiler / IDE floating around on the net. I downloaded quite sometime ago and played with it. Wasn't horrible, but didn't catch my interest. Personally if there is one language I would like to become familiar with its ASM. Unfortunately, it’s all matter of time available to devote to learning it. :sigh:
Joe Woodbury wrote:
One piece of trivia I just learned is that Anders Hejlsberg, key designer for C# was the architect of Delphi
Yea, I thought this was pretty well known, it has cropped up in the lounge a few times. :Shrugs: I'm still not yet .NET enabled. Although I have started reading a book on C# and have written one small throw away app in it. It’s not a bad language; it does have some nice features.
I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley: