Date: Thu, 11 Mar 93 10:42:53 -0600
From: rcharif AT math DOT utexas DOT edu
Posted-Date: Thu, 11 Mar 93 10:42:53 -0600
To: LIP AT odie DOT ee DOT wits DOT ac DOT za
Cc: turnbull AT ecolan DOT sbs DOT ohio-state DOT edu, djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: thanks and GNUish advocacy
Reply-To: rcharif AT math DOT utexas DOT edu

Hi,

    Actually I'm on a crusade to convince people that GCC is better than
    BC, MSC, TC and ZTC.  Free software is a big plus (plus), cross
    platform portability is another, good support a third good reason :-)
    (sound familiar to Borland user's) .

If you need full 32 bit compiler and cross platform support, then GCC
is the best choice. BC, TC and MSC don't generate full 32 bit code (BC
generates 16 bit code with some arithmetic in 32 bit). ZTC has more
bugs than you can encounter in GCC (I know what I am talking about, I
used ZTC for 2 years before switching to GCC), and ZTC extender sucks.
It doesn't support virtual memory nor its graphic library compares to
libgrx.

GCC is under constant release, you can get the current work from
isis.rutgers.edu and this includes constant bug correction.

The news group and lists like djgpp or emx provide you with hundreds
of 'customer support' people who are willing to help and mainly know
the product (compared to commercial support). And if you need
professional support, cygnus people are very competent.

The main rival for GCC isn't BC, TC nor ZTC, but Watcom and Intel code
builder. I think Watcom managed to make their 32 bit code run under
windows. But this was easier for them to do because they have control
over their executable file format. With djgpp we are stuck with the
a.out format, which is nice but cannot be ported to DPMI 0.9.

DJGPP main problem is gdb, but I hope that someone will correct that
one day. But if you have a 486-DX or a x87 you can use emx gdb.

That's some of the reasons I can think of to switch to GCC,
This is merely a sample listing of some facts,
hope this will help you

Regards,
Rami