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From: anders@verity.com (Anders Wallgren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Problem using Zortech C++ and MacApp
Message-ID: <1991May23.204438.12839@verity.com>
Date: 23 May 91 20:44:38 GMT
References: <0101000D.uxsb5f@nan.co.uk>
Sender: usenet@verity.com (USENET News)
Reply-To: anders@verity.com (Anders Wallgren)
Organization: Verity, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 31
In-Reply-To: sw@nan.co.uk (Sak Wathanasin)

We just got Zortech C++, and I installed it, which was pretty easy,
although there were a few typos in the 'recommended modifications' I
had to make to MacApp.  Luckily they were syntactic in nature, so you
wouldn't have been able to compile without getting it right first.

Unfortunately, that's about as far as I got.  I couldn't get it to
compile my app, because it complained about return values for MacApp
methods that I override in my C++ classes, and I couldn't figure it
out and haven't had time to call tech support.

Speed-wise, I was somewhat impressed.  I heard from the MacApp team at
WWDC that "ztc without load/dump (which it doesn't have yet) was
almost as fast as CFront with load/dump", but my experiences didn't
really confirm this.  On top of the already hefty MacApp headers, we
have at least that much again of our own header files, and their
preprocessor took its sweet time.  Caveat this with my inability to
compile my entire app, wasn't running with a ram disk (because I
couldn't figure out what ztc was using as it's temporary area - turns
out the documentation is wrong), and haven't done any rigorous tests.
Lets just say that it definately isn't slower.  With load/dump it may
prove much faster.

Another problem that I have is that it doesn't yet support the
32-bit-everything runtime environment, which I need since our app
smokes the jump table and global data limits with a vengeance.
Hopefully this will be forthcoming.

Conclusion: not enough data yet to say whether it's worth the price or
whether you should stick to MPW CFront.

anders