From: Psilon AT concentric DOT net (Avery Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.os.msdos.djgpp,rec.games.programmer
Subject: Re: The numer 1 compiler, DJGPP or MSVC  Here's a good rating comparision
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 1997 20:11:41 GMT
Organization: Concentric Internet Services
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Ron Hiler <bndwgn AT pacbell DOT net> wrote:

>Avery Lee wrote:
>Only the
>> crappiest of 32-bit compilers (hmmm... Borland? :) ) would be beaten by a
>> 16-bit compiler in terms of the speed of a serious program.
>
>This comment is of some concern to me.  I use Borland compilers, and am
>about to upgrade to the new version (either Builder or 5.0 (right?)). 
>Is there some significant reason Borland is bad?  Should I go with
>something else? (Please dont say DJGPP, I'm addicted to the IDE).

It was meant to be a joke, but at least with certain versions of their
compiler, Borland has been known to sacrifice code speed for compilation
speed.  I've never found a bug in the optimized code generation of Watcom,
but I've found at least one serious bug in Turbo C++ 3.1, where a huge
pointer did not increment its segment pointer properly.  This is a BIG bug,
and the only workaround I found was to use inline assembly to increment the
pointer.

Powerpack 32-bit programs are a special pain because they require Borland's
VxD to support paging under Windows, or else they refuse to run.  This is a
real pain, and unnecessary under the Windows environment, where DPMI
programs are already paged.  If you're planning on writing 32-bit DOS, I'd
say go to Watcom, and if you want to program Win32, go to MSVC++.  I can't
see any reason for using Borland anymore.

But then again, this is only my opinion.


-- Avery Lee (Psilon AT concentric DOT net)
Try my freeware junk at http://www.concentric.net/~Psilon
(pages revised 8/6/97 - all programs include source)
* VGAPaint 386 V1.3/1.4b4: 32-bit paint program
* VETools 1.21: 2:1 compression for Watcom executables
* IPXfer5 1.6a: easy file transfers over networks at 450k/s
* Playwav 1.2: PC speaker sound for older computers
* Stellaryx/PC 1.1: Shoot-em-up from the Amiga, ported to the PC
* LMPStat 1.0: Pages of statistics for DOOM ][ .LMP files