bhag wrote:
hi all,
I'm writing because I haven't been able to find enough
information at the
book stores and at the MS web site on some of my questions. Perhaps
I'm
asking the wrong questions, but if you could help me out here, I'd
really
appreciate it.
Iam a project trainee. I have to give an presentation over the
topic, For engineering applications, whether VC++ 6.0 is more suitable
than other .NET or not. For that i need to know about the performance,
portability etc.,
To add to David's fine answer:
Each new version of VC++ has been more standard compliant than the one
before. VC6 is non-compliant in many many areas, VC7 a little better.
VC7.1 was a huge leap in conformance, and VC8 makes minor improvements
beyond that. If you're interested in portable C++ code, you're best off
using VC7.1 or VC8. Large open source C++ libraries like Boost compile with
VC7.1 and VC8 and work perfectly.
Each compiler has generally seen optimizer improvements as well, so code
compiled with the same options will generally be faster when compiled with a
newer compiler. Confounding that trend, some defaults have changed, and a
great deal more runtime checking has been added to debug builds, so while
fully optimized release builds have gotten faster, debug builds have gotten
slower - in some cases a lot slower - but the additional runtime checks will
help you identify and locate a large number of bugs that the older runtime
library would have let you get away with (or simply crashed mysteriously).
As David said, many C++ users have stuck with VC6 because they prefer the
IDE. In my experience, those are users that are heavily invested in MFC,
which has much better IDE support in VC6 than in the later versions. If
you're not using MFC (and if you're worried about portable code, then you
shouldn't be using MFC), then the differences in the newer IDEs are much
less painful. For my own work, I found that after I used the new IDE for a
couple weeks, I much preferred it over the VC6 version. Your mileage may
vary.
-cd
