C++ development environment and compiler which one?
 

OK, for various reasons I am giving C++ another crack.
I have had programming experience before but I want to get an up to date C++ environment and compiler.

Seems there are quite a few and choosing ain't easy.

Do I go with Visual Studio Express one?

Or go for Borelands version and many others.

Given I am starting out again please help me out but give me pros and cons for each but keep it simple.

cheers

Are yoo going to be progamming exclusivley for windows? If so I would probably go with M$ Studio C++ and/or C#. API's Galore.

Allthough I used to Borland products back in the day for cross platform work, but that was a loong time ago.

I would say use the route of least resistance :salute:

Cheers

Garion aka Jevhaddah

Never used Borland, but MSVC++ works great for me. Never had any major problems with it (except maybe some linking errors that occasionally happen, but completely rebuilding/recompiling fixes those).

What are you trying to accomplish? On what platforms do you want your software to run?

PD

Purely Windows environment...

I'm learning C++ to help me out in my career since I am studying Electrical Engineering and when I start the degree course I will be doing electronics too..

Well, there's certainly nothing wrong with using Visual Studio for your purposes. It's pretty good as far as IDEs go, and the compiler is good as well.

That being said...
For C/C++ stuff without a huge amount of classes, an IDE can often be used as a crutch by a student. They abstract some of the compiler/linker stuff away into the build button and you really should not need autocompletion at first, you should learn compiling from the terminal and using the STLs. IDEs have their place. I do some work for a company whose project consists of thousands of lines of code, it would be confusing for me without an IDE. At the majority of the student level, I question the benefit of an IDE.

And depending how much CS your school makes you take/how much you think you will actually use it in the real world it may be beneficial to NOT use an IDE, or the MSFT toolset at all. I'm about halfway through my CS degree and I know the local university here makes you ssh into a *nix server and do your development in their environment which consists of: the command line compiler, vim/emacs, and your assortment of *nix bash commands. More businesses than you think work this way as well, and it's becoming more common with a lot of the newer interpreted languages that make an IDE seem silly (Ruby, Python). It is a really good idea to become comfortable working with what the Unix console offers.

I will leave my personal feelings about MSFT's development stack out of this.

Sorry if that was long winded :)

PD

You should check with your uni. They might have a preference for one compiler in particular.


BTW in what year are you having it? It's a 1st year course here.

All fine and well, but if you're just starting with C/C++ it's probably best to use an IDE:03:
The first few tasks you'll get will fit into one single file and probably even in just the main() function. But later on when you've got multiple files and libraries, having a linker really helps you.

I'm at college part time doing night school, this is something purely in my own time but is sometimes asked for in the jobs I am interested in and is definately done on the university course that I hope to start next year.

I want to go the route that will give me a good understanding of the basics. I used Visual Studio a few years ago with Visual Basic so know what it is about, but would rather start at the basics rather than straight with a GUI interface a la Visual Studio.

So for and IDE which would be a good one to go for.

Hehe trust me, VC++ isn't anything like the drag-and-drop-IDE that VB is:) You've got absolutely no drag-and-drop functionality, you'll have to code everything.

If you click the "New Project" icon, make sure you select "Win32 Console Application", click OK and on the next window select "console application" and check "Empty project". Click finish, go to the solution explorer, right-click "Source files" and add a main.cpp file to it. This will give you an empty file in which you can put your code.