12 replies to this topic

[sk0rg3]

im looking for a good C++ compiler i tried many different ones, (use what ever i had at the time).
what are you suggestions

[Reedbeta]

What language do you want to compile?

[sk0rg3]

C++
sorry thought i put that in the OP

[Reedbeta]

For Windows, Visual Studio is where it's at. The Express Editions are free and include just about everything you'd want; you can download them from Microsoft's website.

For Mac OS / Linux, it's gcc of course. If you want to maintain Linux compatibility and work on Windows, mingw is a popular re-packaging of gcc for Windows.

Another popular and good one is clang. I haven't used it myself, but it's cross-platform and supposed to be better than gcc in some ways.

[sk0rg3]

ok
thanks for the suggestion
VS 2012 doesnt work on vista would 11 work

[Reedbeta]

I still use VS 2010 myself and so do many other people. A lot of third-party libraries and stuff aren't even compiled for VS 2012 yet. (There is no VS 2011; the previous version was 2010.)

[Vilem Otte]

For C++ Visual Studio is suprisingly really garbage. Yeah it has nice environment, it has intellisense in editor, but compiler is basically useless. I also don't mention that MSVC doesn't stick to C++ standards (neither to C standards), there are severe bugs within standard C++ library shipped with MSVC.

If you're looking for decent compiler (and I mean just compiler), you should stick with either gcc (Gnu Compiler Collection) and it's g++, or Clang (which actually uses LLVM - Low Level Virtual Machines - that produce really high quality code for target machine), respectively clang++. These 2, especially clang, produces high quality (even readable!) assembly, clang also gives you very good error messages (gcc gives you garbage error messages, error log for single little forgotten ';' can grow to like 1k lines output in terminal).

[Reedbeta]

Vilem Otte, on 08 March 2013 - 02:06 AM, said:

For C++ Visual Studio is suprisingly really garbage. Yeah it has nice environment, it has intellisense in editor, but compiler is basically useless.

That is a strong statement considering all the perfectly good projects that have been developed in VS and the many thousands of software companies that use it.

[Stainless]

Yes, VS is actually very good. Okay it has a few bits and pieces that are not perfect, it leaves a lot of little bits of memory unused and I hate intellisense, but it's very good.

The next best I have used is devcpp, which is free. There are loads of libraries available for it and you can browse and install them from within the ide.

A lot of people use eclipse with mingw, but that really is a personal preference. It's a bit like the blender / max thing. The guys who can afford it buy max, the people who can't use blender, then get religious about it. But if you have used max you hate blender.... it's one of those things.

[rouncer]

i use -> vs2010, but it probably is garbage

[Vilem Otte]

#Reedbeta - yup it is strong statement. I personally also use it for some projects, and it is really good to work inside. As I mentioned, I was speaking about compiler quality (not the IDE) -> If I get some time today I'll post some assembly output from VS/Gcc/Clang for you to compare.

This probably won't give you problems as long as you stay in VS and Windows, but basically developing things like operating systems is just close-to-impossible in VS (due to compiler).

Also I mentioned standards. VS native C compiler hasn't got any single existing standard (not ansi, not c89, not c99, not c11, not gnu-extended c, etc.) it seems like using some Microsoft's own standard (and it is really messy) -> developing any C application in VS is a pain. This is quite a problem, because all libraries should have C interface (for portability & usage in other languages -> that is with C++ close to impossible).

As for standard libraries shipped with VS, they have severe bugs. STL doesn't support aligned memebers in containers (however according to stdlibc++ and stl specifications it SHOULD), some STL functors have different behaviour than the standard says, somehow MS prefers it's own system functions over LIBC ones (which makes annoying thousands of warning lines during compilation), etc. Though these things can be ignored or better "repaired" (by using some different implementations of standard libraries) -> but why can't Microsoft at least use standards and clean standard libraries?

[Stainless]

because they are microsoft!

[geon]

Stainless, on 08 March 2013 - 08:40 AM, said:

The next best I have used is devcpp, which is free. There are loads of libraries available for it and you can browse and install them from within the ide.

DevCpp has been dead for a looong time. Code::Blocks is nice on windows/linux but is super-slow on osx.