Watcom

Noob alert..

I'm going with Watcom for a first programming environment to work in. Due to the fact that it's free and there's a wide range of literature to reference on the web and otherwise.

Before I go past Hello World and Tetris clones, is this a wise move for a novice. If not what would be the best route as far as learning curve and offered support?

I'm going to assume that you mean Watcom C, but do you also mean OpenWatcom or an older version of the compiler? I'm assuming so, but I thought I'd ask.

If by "programming environment" you mean the IDE, then I'm not too familiar with the Open Watcom Editor that comes with OpenWatcom. Even though a quick look at the OpenWatcom page looks like it has decent community support behind it, the fact that I haven't heard much about it makes me wonder what the quality of support for it would be like.

Alternative environments are, of course, Visual Studio (.NET), KDevelop or Anjuita if you're on a *nix machine (which will likely use the GNU Compiler Collection instead), DJGPP and MinGW which are basically the GNU environment for Windows/DOS in one way or another, or just dropping an IDE and using whatever editor you feel comfortable with. These days, I use Makefiles, GNU Autotools, Emacs, and GCC directly if I need to do any sort of C/C++ stuff.

Hopefully this is what you were asking...

Ed said:

Noob alert..

I'm going with Watcom for a first programming environment to work in. Due to the fact that it's free and there's a wide range of literature to reference on the web and otherwise.

Before I go past Hello World and Tetris clones, is this a wise move for a novice.

No. You'd be much better off using either gcc or Visual Studio.

Watcom was popular in the mid-1990s, and was even used for Doom. It was open sourced a few years ago so there's been a bit of revival in interest. That said, gcc and Visual C++ are really the only two compilers out there worth considering nowadays.

If you're using Windows, you can try either Cygwin or Mingw which are ports of gcc. Codeblocks and Dev-C++ seem to be popular IDEs for Mingw. On MacOS, you need to download the xcode SDK which comes with a copy of gcc. On Linux and other Unix systems, gcc should be available as a package or installed by default.

Visual Studio is commercial software, so you have to pay for it. However, there is the Visual Studio Express version that you can download for no cost.

fraggle said:

That said, gcc and Visual C++ are really the only two compilers out there worth considering nowadays.

Know anything about PGI? I saw some ads for it in Linux Magazine.

exp(x) said:

Know anything about PGI? I saw some ads for it in Linux Magazine.

I think I actually used that in school. It's focused on writing software for clusters from what I remember. I guess if you want to write a parallel raytracer like we did it might come in handy...

fraggle said:

No. You'd be much better off using either gcc or Visual Studio.

Watcom was popular in the mid-1990s, and was even used for Doom. It was open sourced a few years ago so there's been a bit of revival in interest. That said, gcc and Visual C++ are really the only two compilers out there worth considering nowadays.

If you're using Windows, you can try either Cygwin or Mingw which are ports of gcc. Codeblocks and Dev-C++ seem to be popular IDEs for Mingw. On MacOS, you need to download the xcode SDK which comes with a copy of gcc. On Linux and other Unix systems, gcc should be available as a package or installed by default.

Visual Studio is commercial software, so you have to pay for it. However, there is the Visual Studio Express version that you can download for no cost.

That's what I'd started on years ago. I'm gonna try and find a copy of Visual Studio but for now I'll mess around with the free version.

Here comes an endless line of progressively more advanced calenders and form displays with ugly graphics :D

The Express versions of Visual Studio are the exact same as the "real" versions other than not being able to use any plugins. If you're just starting out I don't see how you'll really miss anything. I use VS2005 at work and feel downright crippled at home though :(

david_a said:

I think I actually used that in school. It's focused on writing software for clusters from what I remember. I guess if you want to write a parallel raytracer like we did it might come in handy...

My dissertation involved parallel programming, but in Java. Quite amazing what you can do without additional "parallel packages".

I would definitely not recommend C or C++ for a learner's programming language. Java or VB .NET would be much more appropriate. Basically something with a garbage collector.

Maes said:

My dissertation involved parallel programming, but in Java. Quite amazing what you can do without additional "parallel packages".

This was an Advanced Graphics class where we decided to modify our raytracer from Graphics 1 (written in C++) to run on the school's cluster of 16 dual-processor machines. If you're suggesting that in one quarter length class we should have ported the raytracer to Java and written some parallel system from scratch rather than just using the installed PGI compiler with OpenMP and MPI, well, good for you.

Well, mine was a new project from scratch, intended to run on a pretty limited SMP system (2 XEON processors with Hyperthreading, with a max. parallelism of 4 threads), and using only Java's built in tools (hand-coded threads, not even automatic parallelisation tools).

I know very well that cluster programming is another thing, and that cannot be bridged by using Java alone...unless you're willing to write your own comms system from scratch. Still, for simple SMP, Thread-level parallel applications, Java provides out-of-the-box support for threads and even some not-so-bad parallel tools, and C# followed suit. MPI or PGI are another matter though...