Advice on which C to hang one's hat.

GeoTrail · Post by **GeoTrail** » Wed Nov 24, 2004 2:42 pm

I agree with Dev-Cpp.
It has most of the headers you need, specially for learning, and the IDE is very simple and easy to use.

Personally I couldn't compile a simple console app to less then 300 k. Probably something I did wrong. Have you tried Microsoft c++ 2005 Express? It is currently in beta and free for download.

fsw · Post by **fsw** » Thu Nov 25, 2004 12:45 am

GeoTrail wrote:I agree with Dev-Cpp.
It has most of the headers you need, specially for learning, and the IDE is very simple and easy to use.

Personally I couldn't compile a simple console app to less then 300 k. Probably something I did wrong. Have you tried Microsoft c++ 2005 Express? It is currently in beta and free for download.

Just downloaded the newest version and compiled the MdiApp example (gui), and it comes to 35060 bytes.
The hello example (console) comes to 424339 bytes, not bad for 16 lines of code 8O
There must be something wrong.

GeoTrail · Post by **GeoTrail** » Thu Nov 25, 2004 12:53 am

fsw, yeah I know.
I read somewhere that you can use the strip command to stip out unnesseccary stuff, but I could never get that working. I've spent hours trying to configure the compiler for the smallest output and never had much luck with it.

thefool · Post by **thefool** » Thu Nov 25, 2004 6:31 pm

Dont use IOStream, if you want a small app. Use stdio as include, and use printf('hello'); for printing .

GeoTrail · Post by **GeoTrail** » Thu Nov 25, 2004 7:10 pm

Isn't stdio mainly for C and iostream for c++?

GedB · Post by **GedB** » Thu Nov 25, 2004 7:13 pm

One of the problems with Dev-Cpp is that it uses GCC, which is a unix compiler.

CGYWIN provides the Unix commands needed to compile with GCC, but this requires a separate DLL.
http://www.cygwin.com/

To get over this Dev-Cpp uses Mingw. Mingw does a similar job to CYGWIN and was based on an earlier version. The advantage is that it is statically bound.
http://www.mingw.org/

This causes the extra overhead

Thats the cost of true cross compatability, I'm afraid.

GeoTrail · Post by **GeoTrail** » Thu Nov 25, 2004 7:17 pm

Yeah that sucks.
Anyways, I got Turbo C++ which compiles to pretty small executables. But that is just a DOS compiler and doesn't always work when running from within Windows. Does anyone know of a different Win compatible compiler I can use with Turbo c++ ?

Post by **Rings** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 2:24 pm

Borland released a free version of their c++ compiler (c++ Builder) ( see and download here ) , a commandline compiler which should been compatible with the 'older' TurboC++ one .

GeoTrail · Post by **GeoTrail** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 2:31 pm

Thanks for the link Rings

Checking it out now.