Sigh. I have been using Dev-C++ for years now, and it has served me well. However, there’s more than enough wrong with it… among which the fact that it has not been updated for several years, and that examples, external libraries and the like are never, ever aimed at this IDE. I’ve coped with the fact that I had to convert said examples myself… but no more. To get work started on the script engine, I’ll finally do what I should have done a long time ago; drop dev-c++ for something better.
Being the choice for the large majority of programmers out there, Microsoft’s Visual C++ Express Edition sounded like a good choice. But no matter what I do, no matter which settings, no matter how small the project is; I cannot seem to get it going to my liking. I’ve built JSON_Spirit, which is a very lightweight JSON parser, into a library- 70 MB when done by MSVC!! It did 15 minutes over the graphics section of my project alone, after which I cancelled it well before it was done, it actually deletes files from the HDD rather than the project if you’re not careful… It must be my, and my hate for MS… but it’s smiply not for me.
And then there was CodeBlocks. I had heard from it in the past as a good alternative for MSVC, and man, were they right. Straight off the bat, I can import my dev-c++ project, alter no more than 10 lines of code, and the damn thing runs like a charm. Fast, clear as daylight, supporting more than one project in the workspace- I have a feeling I’m beginning to like this IDE already 
0 Responses to “Microsoft… how I loathe thee…”