my life with c++

[kryton9]

Well my life with concentrated focus on c++ has come to an end.
What I have learned from my studies:
1. c++ is actually a great language, its initial shortcomings come from C.
2. the Standard Template Library along with Boost really bring incredible power to c++
3. Console apps are pretty cross platform code from os to os. GUI apps are not!
4. Besides doing tutorials and class work online, code wise only using Irrlicht and SFML worked as you would expect.
5. Visual Studio while awesome and not its fault per se, but Microsoft drove me nuts. I found out this one long course
I did which eventually lead to creating a great particle engine... well once I took the executable over to another machine... it would not run.
even though I compiled and developed as a win32 app. It just wouldn't run, not giving any useful help on what was needed etc.

Code Blocks (the current official stable version along with mingw32 that comes bundled with it) on the otherhand is great and code compiled with it, works great no matter which windows OS I run it on.

Finally if you looked at your program uninstall control panel in Windows(well if you install alot of games as I do), you will probably find many different Microsoft C++ redistributables. This drives me crazy to see those. It is like old Visual Basic programs that were executables but needed a matching runtime... now they made c++ like that is unforgivable if you ask me :(

But as I wrote, if you use Code Blocks you don't have that problem.

I don't see the need to program in c++ anymore.

I think Delphi / Lazarus(freepascal) makes one more productive with all the power of c++ any hobbyist would need.
The last few years, not counting things like the Unity and UDK game engines, I found that thinBasic and Lazarus were the two languages I developed things in the quickest and funnest manner.

Now to relearn all I forgot in thinBasic.

[Michael Hartlef]

Glad you had a good time and I wish you more of that in the future :)

[kryton9]

Thanks Mike, I wish you the same!

[MikeStefanik]

Finally if you looked at your program uninstall control panel in Windows(well if you install alot of games as I do), you will probably find many different Microsoft C++ redistributables. This drives me crazy to see those. It is like old Visual Basic programs that were executables but needed a matching runtime... now they made c++ like that is unforgivable if you ask me :(


Languages are kind of like clothing, the "best" is often what you're most comfortable wearing. That said, I'd point out that there's no need to build an application in Visual C++ that requires any redistributables. When you create a project, that's the default (to reduce the overall executable size), but you can simply tell it that you want to statically link to the runtime (and MFC, if you're using it) and your program is stand-alone at that point.

There's advantages both ways, and it really depends on your personal preferences an needs. Having things in a redistributable package means that if Microsoft fixes or changes some code (ex: back in 2007 when the law changed daylight savings time, it required a change in the runtime in terms of how that was calculated) then you don't need to recompile your software, you just provide an updated version of the runtime. If you don't want redistributables, then you obviously would need to recompile your software and redistribute the whole thing. If your product is basically a single executable, then not a big deal. However, if your product is large, with many executables and shared DLLs then just being able to push updates for the redistributable runtime libraries can be an advantage.

I know sometimes people wonder why in the heck Microsoft has things work a certain way or why Visual Studio is so large, and a big part of it has to do with the fact that they need to meet the needs of a very broad audience. What a small, independent developer or a hobbiest programmer may feel is excessive or ridiculous is something that's important to an enterprise-wide development team that has hundreds of programmers and millions of lines of code to work with.

[kryton9]

Good points Mike. I do like visual studio a lot, it is a great IDE. But I was doing relatively simple win32 apps, no managed .net apps and still getting strange errors. That the simple exe file would not run when I copied the file to another computer with Windows.

All the redistributables are coming from commercial game installs I do. I just saw one install again today when I installed Serious Sam HD The Second Encounter. Its just funny that you didn't have that problem all those years and it seems like-- post 2005, it is the way things have gone.