Date:	Mon, 27 Jan 1997 16:57:29 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To:	Daniel P Hudson <afn03257 AT freenet3 DOT afn DOT org>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: DJGPP vs Borland C++
In-Reply-To:	<5ch8gs$qps@huron.eel.ufl.edu>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.970127164140.9059A-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0

On 27 Jan 1997, Daniel P Hudson wrote:

>  I doubt that. GCC is about as buggy as Borland DOS products are, and
>  GCC is what you're calling DJGPP. DJGPP is the environment for GCC to
>  run under DOS and has added more bugs to the package.

DJGPP is *not* just GCC + more bugs.  First, there is libc which is 
entirely independent of GCC, and in my experience is much *less* buggy 
than BC.  Then there are DJGPP-ported packages of which Borland users can 
only dream.

> >competes with.  That's not to say that DJGPP is without bugs, but if
> >ou should discover one, chances are it will be fixed and patches made
> >available less than a week after you report it.  Usually it takes only
> >one or two days.
> 
>  Borland HAS ALWAYS made patches avaiable very quickly from their 
>  web/ftp sites.

That might be true for bugs that are simple to solve.  I have reported a 
couple of bugs to Borland about 3 years ago, and last time I looked they 
were still unsolved, although my report included a detailed script and 
analysis which pinpointed the exact cause of the bug.  If that was with 
DJGPP, I would just grab the sources and make the fixes.

>  Point in hand, Borland C++ targets DOS16, DOS32, WIN3x, WIN95, OS/2,
>  and NT while GCC targets DOS32 only. Therefore Borland has a lot more
>  code to screw-up,

I disagree.  You should count the code size per dedicated programmer, not
the sheer size of the package.  If you do that, you will see that DJGPP
has much more code per programmer, and therefore should be more buggy, not
less.  But in reality, DJGPP has less bugs.  I submit that the fact that
the sources are free to be browsed and edited make debugging easier and
improve the product faster, because everyone who's interested can look
inside, spot the bugs and suggest changes.  When the sources aren't
available, the burden to find and fix the bugs rests on the maintainer
alone. 

>  GCC and DJGPP are as buggy as the old Borland DOS based
>  systems were. Large software packages are going to have bugs, there
>  is no way around it.

Yes, there is: get the sources, debug them, submit the analysis to the
maintainers, talk to them and have the problem solved in a few days.  With
a commercial product, you cannot do that, at least in my experience. 

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