Comments on: Escaping the Windows prison

By: Viktoras Makauskas

Viktoras Makauskas — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 16:01:35 +0000

“Linux as a better developer environment” should come with “you want to be this tall to use Linux for development”. You won’t really benefit much while you do semi-basic stuff. But then there comes a day when you stumble upon a tool that needs hacks to run on windows, or not available on platform altogether, or is hard to start/configure due to shell limitations and stupid path names, and the pattern repeats, and then you realize it’s easier to just stop fighting windows and switch to something else.

But, like I said, one should grow into the need for this. Maya developer, alt-tabbing between python editor, VC++ and maya, is not really hard pressed to leave windowsland.

By: Charles Palmer

Charles Palmer — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 06:23:36 +0000

IDEwise JetBrains C++ offering just went into beta.

By: robert kist

robert kist — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 01:26:11 +0000

I’m not that much of a VS fan (maybe because I haven’t dug into some of its advanced features yet?), but I think any course about game / 3D related programming should feature an intro to VS. Not because it’s good, or powerful or whatever, but because it’s a de-facto industry standard. Chances are, that you’ll have to touch it one time or the other when working with C# or C++.

On the other hand, you don’t want student’s IDE exposure to be Linux lopsided either. Why not aim for a balance and critical comparison? On the same note as I am pro-VS, I think it may also be worth to give a quick intro to XCode.

As an employer I would be happy if people have some basic understanding of such popular environments, rather than being clueless and starting at zero. And once students have been exposed and got an overview, why not let them pick the best tool for their future needs? The only downside I see is that it could be a problem to cram 3 different platforms and environments into one course… but you can always provide hand picked links to in-depth resources and starter tutorials, which interested students can follow.

By: Jóhann Haukur Gunnarsson

Jóhann Haukur Gunnarsson — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:05:24 +0000

I agree with all your points. However, if you are developing on Windows, Chocolatey will make your life far easier. Yes, it’s “almost” like apt-get for Windows. (https://chocolatey.org/)

By: dorf

dorf — Mon, 08 Sep 2014 23:51:31 +0000

I’ll admit I’ve barely used linux. I do own a macbook air, but can’t stand the OS–

I can see the appeal of the command line for automating builds etc.

Compared Visual C++ against what is available on linux:

Better in VC++(assuming you install Visual Assist pluggin):
-Debugger is fast and reliable.
-Excellent code navigation, making it very easy to jump around the code
-With Visual Assist you get C++ refactoring support, it works quite well
-none retarded syntax highlighting that you can customize
-has built in profiler
-fast IDE
Worse in VC++:
-The compiler is not as up to date with C++11/14, this sucks:/
-The project/solution setup is clunky, but you can automate this, and generate the files yourself instead of letting VS do it.
-The way they handle precompiled headers is fairly idiotic, and you can’t share them between projects

I really do want to learn linux properly, but I find it unlikely that developing C++ on Linux is a very enjoyable experience–

You can automate VS builds easily enough, just launch msbuild and tell it to build your solution file.

C++ does not have a package manager so that type of thing is basically irrelevant for my purpose.