Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!imagen!qmsseq!pipkins From: pipkins@qmsseq.imagen.com (Jeff Pipkins) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer Subject: Re: Best C Compiler Keywords: Compilers Message-ID: <126@qmsseq.imagen.com> Date: 21 Mar 90 20:14:51 GMT References: <1990Mar19.175316.16898@Octopus.COM> <3130@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <1990Mar20.163453.29787@Octopus.COM> Reply-To: pipkins@qmsseq.UUCP (Jeff Pipkins) Organization: QMS Inc., Mobile, Alabama Lines: 77 I'd like to hear from someone who has used the WATCOM C compiler! It's gotten rave reviews, and they have a good reputation for super- optimizing compilers in the mainframe world. Their compiler comes with EVERYTHING, including an integrated environment for those of you who like that sort of thing, complete with profiler and debugger. News rags say that they just signed an agreement with Boreland to get their debugger. MY TWO BITS' WORTH: I'm tired of hearing religious flames about Turdo C and MSC. More than that, I'm tired of the attitudes of the companies that produce these compilers. I would love to see someone take their business away. The rest of this article explains why I feel that way. MICROSOFT: My beef with Microsoft is that they use proprietary knowledge to compete unfairly. At one time they had undocumented DOS calls in their C startup code. Since they wrote the DOS, they knew the calls. When they announced OS/2 (that they wrote), guess who had the first compiler available for it? I think a bit a trust-busting is in order here. That sentiment is probably the biggest reason for the large number of Borland fans out there. I used to be one for that reason. No more. BORLAND: My beef with Borland is two-fold. First, their products have a cheap, unprofessional, sometimes even buggy feel and finish. The second is that their attitude toward their customers outrages me. I switched from MSC to Turdo C in the middle of a commercial project when it first came out. It proved to be a big mistake to trust a commercial project to an unprofessional tool, with no sympathy or support from its makers. I sent Borland a piece of code which demonstrated a disasterous bug in their compiler. When you compile it with certain options, it would wipe out the root directory of the hard disk! You didn't have to RUN the program, JUST COMPILE IT with their compiler. They CONFIRMED this error. They did not even so much as appologize. They just said, "We don't intend to do anything about it. Wait for the next version." The letter I sent to them was sent via a CompuServ posting, which disapeared very quickly. Someone else on that forum asked for a bug list. Someone from Borland replied that they DID NOT KEEP A BUGLIST! (They were "fixing bugs so fast" that they "couldn't even keep up" with it...) I also think it is pretty raunchy of them to keep their compiler and especially their libraries incompatible with Microsoft's _on_purpose_. They asked Allen Hollub what it would take to get him to use their compiler instead of Microsoft's. He said, make it compile my existing programs without modification. They left with a frown. This incompatibility is a MARKETING issue, not an engineering issue. That's what burns me up about it. CONCLUSION: I can't stand any company that tries to control and manipulate their customers. I want them to win my business through excellence and a good price/performance ratio. I am enraged at companies that try to win by business by force. Microsoft and Borland have both demonstrated this tactic. I think they would be better received if they would peddle their compilers in the Soviet Union. SO I ADMIT THAT I HAVE PREJUDICES against certain products because of the attitudes of the companies that make them. Let's turn this potential flame war into something constructive. If you have a C compiler religion, it doesn't help to state it unless you first look inside yourself and tell us WHY you feel that way. It is constructive to find out how a once objective opinion can be soured with specific bad experiences. It is not constructive to chime in with a boolean opinion. Jeff Pipkins pipkins@imagen.com My employer does not necessarily share my personal views.