It is still incomplete Harbour guide to choice C compiler for Windows platformFirst steep in harbour is choice of a c compilerThis is priority list of compilers / platforms supported by Harbour MSVC 2008, MSVC 2005, MingW/GCC 4.x, OpenWatcom. [ BCC only to do quick draft Harbour builds and to clean code from warnings/errors. ] SpeedThere are also pretty extensive C compiler benchmark pages on the net, and the overall conclusion is that the slower the compiling process is, the faster the compiled binary, and the _general_ rank by speed is usually this: ICC (non-free), MSVC, GCC, BCC. Compilation speed rank is about the reverse. For speed testing use speedtst.prg is perfectly good. Or just build your app and try.
Microsoft vc 2008 Microsoft Visual c++ 2008 express ver 9 support w32,w64,arm is Modern Free (Express Edition) but not open source, fast Microsoft Visual C++ (often abbreviated as MSVC) is a commercial integrated development environment (IDE) product engineered by Microsoft for the C, C++, and C++/CLI programming languages. It has tools for developing and debugging C++ code http://www. <http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/>microsoft<http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/> .com/ <http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/>express/vc/<http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/> Visual Studio 2008 Standard and Professional editions have x64<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64> compiler support, and Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite supports both x64<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64> and IA-64 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium>. you can download Microsoft Visual C++ Express from http://www.microsoft.com/express/vcsharp/ Here you can download sdk for visual c++ from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e6e1c3df-a74f-4207-8586-711ebe331cdc&displaylang=en MingW/GCC Min Gw Open source Multi platform MingW/GCC support w32,arm open source is a open source tools, GCC has a few drawbacks on Windows (executable size). Open watcom Open Watcom is open source Honestly can't see it's advantages if we compare it to MSVC or GCC. Even if it's a good compiler, today it's not mainstream, so it's not widely supported and this makes it difficult to use it to compile 3rd party packages, or find support for it. OW seems the best choice out of the "non-mainstream" bunch of compilers though, and it seems superior to BCC in most aspects, except support and general acceptance. This may change as OpenWatcom has the potential to grow and gain acceptance (being OSS), while I believe BCC is pretty much dying. OW is here much better (speed of execution). Exe is bigger than from BCC, but the pace On disk you have busy/spent 53 Mb 708 kb with custom OW 1.8 ver. When you instal full version (Linux, DOS, OS/2, Novell, Win 3.1, Etc, etc) you need 189 Mb 204 kb. Borland C ++ Borland c++ 5.5 Old l lite but little buggy Borland ver 5.82 (free) and 5.9 is supported from most library(mediator) but limited to w32 platform No serious compilers on the free (and non-free) software marked use BCC. It's a historical thing that Harbour picked it up (*), and developers followed suit 10 years ago and stuck with it since then. [ (*) With reason, as 10 years ago this was pretty much the first mainstream and usable compiler to go free, GCC just began to gain acceptance and maturity with version 2.95, but it was much slower on the computers of that time. Times have changed, and none of these advantages are relevant anymore. ] This choice have result also to compatibility with additional library the object module library use as Format OMF (BORLAND) or COFF (MICROSOFT,MINGW, PELLES C) The OMF is Microsoft defined format but Microsoft at one point decided to abandon it in favor of a Microsoft defined variant on COFF Just as there are OMF- and COFF-format object files (.obj's), there are also OMF and COFF format library files (.lib's). http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/PECOFF.mspx http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/ <http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/coff/> doc/coff/ <http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/coff/> Borland c++ 5.5 has 8.9MB single install file. There are many talks about calling conventions, but until know I've successfully linked all .dll files I've needed (with BCC made import libraries), regardless compiler .dll was compiler with. There are much more problems with .h and .lib files compatibility than with .dlls. I use gcc (actually mingw) for some projects, because I'm unable to link GTK .h files with BCC. I've done some mingw tests in the past (trying to move from BCC to mingw), but mingw speed was poor. Perhaps because of not very good RTL code, for example mingw uses windows heap functions instead of high quality dlmalloc, ptmalloc allocators. I still like a small disk size programs, so, I guess I'll switch to mingw (it has 50MB on disk) some time. BCC bugs can make me do this switch very quickly, but until know these bugs does not exposes itself in end user applications. Mediator is also available for MSVC. Binary distributions for Windows usually support MSVC and MingW these days, sometimes Borland, but it's fading. Anyhow above two packages show exactly why closed commercial products can tie developer's hand, even if they are otherwise good and useful ones.
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