On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, george williams wrote:
> Perhaps a question for hardcore developers:
>
> I've been using gcc with a minimal emacs dev
> environment and it works fine. Are there
> any great reasons to move to a prettier dev
> solution like MetroWorks?
I can think of a few reasons, none having to do with prettyness.
1. The example programs have resource files that aren't in pilrc format,
so you can't easily edit them (and I have a prctobin, but not the next
step that will generate a .rcp file).
2. There is some difference between some handling, e.g. the A5 world v.s.
GCCs usage as a4 as a global pointer. The O'Reilly book goes into some
detail. This is sub-optimal but shouldn't affect the functionality.
3. Occasionally I have had the -O3 flag overoptimize, in one case it was
something of the form i++,cp++;, where i would count to 10, so GCC simply
put 10 in i (and forgot about the cp++). This might have been fixed, and
the structure was a bit obscure and I haven't seen this in a very long
while.
Conversely,
1. I use linux, and MW doesn't have a linux port that I know of yet.
2. I don't think MW understands normal posix tools. In one case, I have a
patch file that transforms a program+database into a monolith. It also
patches my .rcp file. I couldn't patch a resource file easily. And I
prefer the normal makefiles. They allow me to integrate hand-optimized
source more easily. When you have an IDE you are normally limited to the
functions the IDE has.
