Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/01/31/15:42:04
On 24 Jan 1997 15:03:38 GMT boylesgj AT lion DOT cs DOT latrobe DOT edu DOT au (Gregary J
Boyles) writes:
>I have found Borland C++ and Turbo C++ to be very buggy and there is
>no
>way I would part with several hundred dollars for such unreliable
>products. DJGPP is far supperior to any Borland products, at least as
>far
>as DOS compilers go.
>
>I have encountered many problems with Borland products as well as many
>of
>the lectures and tutors at Latrobe University. The problems don't seem
>to
>surface until you try to write large and complicated programs with
>them.
>Some of the problems are as follows.
>
>1) The IDE and PC will nearly always hang at some point when stepping
>through a program with the integrated debugger.
>
Are you making sure that _ALL_ TSR's are not active when you run the
integrated
debugger? This is stressed in the manual.
>2) Despite the fact that all optimizations are turned off the
>integrated
>debugger will skip lines etc, the watch window will state that
>variables
>are undefined when this is clearly not the case and the watch window
>will
>state that a variable is optimized and not available when the
>execution
>bar contains the variable. It makes it close to impossible to debug
>anything!
>
>3) The IDE freezes regularly on key presses, until you hit another
>key,
>and you end up with two characters instead of just one.
>
>4) The Turbo Debugger for DOS provides no way of tiling windows with a
>single key press or mouse click as you can with the IDE.
>
>5) Borland C++ 4.5 for Windows provides no way of changing the target
>executable etc of a project except when you are creating a project (as
>far
>as I can see).
>
>6) The exe files they produce will nearly always hang at some point in
>there execution and it seems to be often on entry to or exit from
>functions which indicates that the stack is not being managed
>properley.
>
Or perhaps you let an unitialized pointer corrupt the stack?
TC++ is _not_ protected mode, i.e. there is no memory protection
>7) One exceptionally bizare problem was that one of my programs worked
>perfectly when run from the hard drive but would hang when run from a
>floppy (again on entry to a function).
>
>I'm sure half these problems stem from that rediculous memory model
>system
>and near and far pointers etc they have used.
>
I will side with you here, many of my programming cronies have
complained about programs with far pointers freezing
>What is also frustrating is that there is virtually nil run time error
>support with programs just hanging the PC without even a hint as to
>what
>went wrong such as 'segmentation fault'. Occasionally you may get
>'stack
>over flow' however half the time this seems to have nothing to do with
>what went wrong.
>
I think your criticism of TC is not entirely warranted, but all the same
I too would take DJGPP over TC without a second thought.
-Fwec
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