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- Path: camelot.dsccc.com!not-for-mail
- From: kcline@sun132.spd.dsccc.com (Kevin Cline)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.apps,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: Which one is better, Object Center or SparcWork for Sun C++ development?
- Date: 17 Jan 1996 22:46:54 -0600
- Organization: DSC Communications Corporation Switch Products Division
- Message-ID: <4dkjbu$rur@sun132.spd.dsccc.com>
- References: <4djgqd$dcc@henry.netaxis.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: sun132.spd.dsccc.com
-
- In article <4djgqd$dcc@henry.netaxis.com>,
- Gower Tang <gtang@netaxis.com> wrote:
- >
- >Hi,
- >
- > My company wants to buy a C++ development suite for our Suns,
- >can you please forward your opinion on the above-mentioned suites?
- >
-
- A year ago I worked on a medium-scale (100K? SLOC) for American
- Airlines that started with ObjectCenter. As soon as Sun came out with
- their new (non-cfront) C++ compiler (SparcWorks version 3, C++ version
- 4) we abandoned ObjectCenter, primarily because of compiler speed. We
- used templates very heavily. At the time, Centerline supplied the
- vanilla AT&T compiler with ObjectCenter, and it's link-time template
- expansion was very very slow compared with the Sun compiler's
- compile-time expansion. The Sparcworks compiler was also able to
- generate much better code than the AT&T compiler. I don't know what
- compiler comes with ObjectCenter now.
-
- There were inconsistencies between the OC interpreter and the
- AT&T (cfront) compiler. The user interface is not really Motif, and
- not really OpenLook either; I found it annoying to use and quite
- buggy. It was deathly slow to load 30K lines of code into
- ObjectCenter. I also got the impression that Centerline was a bit
- strapped for cash, because many OC bugs that should have been easy to
- fix hung around through multiple minor releases. Again, I haven't
- used their product for a year.
-
- DSC also had ObjectCenter and I believe it's been abandoned here too.
-
- To be fair, there are nits in Sparcworks too. The 'debugger' GUI is
- still OpenLook style, and I find it so awful I just use dbx. If you
- know emacs, then you could try using edb; it's one of those things I
- keep meaning to get around to. There are some problems with dbx's C++
- expression evaluator too; in particular, it doesn't convert operator
- expressions into a call to an operator function.
-
- On the whole, though, I am pretty happy with the Sun's compiler team;
- posts to this newsgroup from Mike Ball and Steve Clamage show that the
- team is doing a good job of following the DWP and also that they are
- listening for feedback from their users. I wish they would go ahead
- and provide RTTI and bool though.
-
- I think you would be better off forgetting about purchasing an IDE
- and just use the SparcWorks compiler and dbx with GNU Emacs.
-
- I also recommend that you purchase Purify, Quantify, and Purecov; these
- products are incredibly well-engineered. They are so good that I don't
- think anyone should even bother trying to do better. They are very
- easy to use with a near-perfect user interface and top-notch documentation.
-
- Kevin Cline
-
- --
- Kevin Cline
-