[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 19, Issue 41

[Danny Price]

> 
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:54:51 -0700
> From: Alex Malyushytskyy <alexmalvtk at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Interest] Oops! Somebody's got a bad case of dependency
> 	bloat!
> To: Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
> Cc: "interest at qt-project.org" <interest at qt-project.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAHR9pJ1fT4GiseUe_WgyP8Yd6uMwFKD5Xw_GFXszh8QvJF=RSg at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> 
> Also I disagree with you about Windows not being a good development
> platform.
> I have not done any programming on MAC

I assume you mean Mac. 

MAC = Media Access Control.

> VS provides 99% of the tools I ever needed for development and have the
> most convenient debugging features.
> Convenience of being able to build multiple configuration from a single
> source is a reason I still maintain VS projects together with qmake
> projects and use last only on Linux.
> Whatever is missing can be added for additional cost installing 3rd party
> software.
> You can get something similar on Linux, but at least product which provides
> comparable features we are using there cost more than VS subscription and
> definitely is more expensive than memory management solutions which can be
> integrated in VS.
> I might be not a typical developer, but I've spent a sufficient time
> working on both Windows and Linux.
> And I prefer VS for development.

I've spent considerable time in both the Windows and Unix/Mac world and the biggest difference, when you come down to it, is that 99.99% of everything you need on Unix/Linux/Mac is built in to the base OS or free and very easy to install. 

No MSDN licenses or subscriptions, no expensive upgrade and service pack rollouts.

Windows is quite literally useless out of the box.

I spend a lot of time in Windows Explorer and the Windows command prompt tearing my hair out because it feels like something from 1985 and never gets any better. Yes MS roll out new versions of Windows or VS but nothing ever changes under the hood so you end up working the same way, using the same tools and services, as Windows developers did 15 years ago. And compounding the problem is that Windows users (and even some developers) refuse to upgrade their systems; my company has only just dropped first-line support for Windows XP.

And while GCC and LLVM are evolving at amazing speed, implementing every standard and complex C++11 feature under the sun, Microsoft holds it's developers hostage to it's sloooooow release cycles, spotty standard compliance and flavor-of-the-month proprietary platforms. And they charge the Earth for the privilege! How much does VS2012 Pro cost now? And it doesn't even ship with any kind of memory, profile or threading analyser and you need to install plugins to make it usable.

VS 2010 will typically crash 2 or 3 times a day on me. If I cancel a build it will leave corrupted object files on disk that I have to find and delete (why can't it rebuild them!) and everything on Windows just laaaaags. It feels like the OS is fighting me all the time.

The one thing that VS does well is debugging but that's changing now thanks to LLDB. 

On OSX, even when you strip away all the flashy Apple BS, you're left with a very solid, very capable OS that can do an incredible amount right out of the box whereas a fresh install of Windows? Not so much.