On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Ronald van Loon wrote: > Dear debian-users, > > Yesterday I attended an IBM-conference about IBM's line of VisualAge > products. Great stuff - exactly something that could give Linux an extra > boost. I would like to ask everyone on this list to send IBM an e-mail > (http://www.ibm.com/Assist/ ; if you want to know more about it, > http://www.software.ibm.com/ad/visualage_c++/) > > This is what I send them; I encourage you to send the same or similar; by > making our wishes known, we could win ourselves an important ally.
I would just like to add that everything is not always as good as it might seem. I used VAC++ about a year ago under OS/2. The software recommended at least 32M of ram, and stated that you needed 64 megs to realistically use the visual tools. The compiler proper was so-so, I can't compare it to gcc because I haven't used gcc enough yet. But compared with Watcom and High C++ it didn't fare too well. The Windowing Class Library (OCL I think it's called now) looked nice, very modern C++ with good cross platform capabilities. It did have poorish docs when I was looking at it. Since then VAC++ has become basically the defacto OS/2 compiler, mostly because everyone else dropped support for their compilers on OS/2. The only two things that I think Linux could benift from the VAC set is the debugger (it was very nice looking, but slow and buggy) and the Visual Devel tools -- which were very nice but slow (and probably buggy ;>). Now, I might be biased, I evaluated the beta of the program one year ago and was so unimpressed by it that I didn't even look at the release. My Os/2 friends that did buy it confirmed that the release wasn't all that much better.. Version 4 which I think has been released for windows I haven't even looked at, so I will make no comments. Jason
