dev-cpp-users

[Norman G. <no...@ju...>]

On Fri, 19 Apr 2002 23:36:00 +0100 "Jason Hardman"
<jas...@bt...> writes:

> ... The version of GCC that MinGW supplies is 2.?? ...

Version 2.95. Although gcc is currently up to the 3.11 or somewhere near
that, there seems to be a few problems with the latest releases.

> ... The current MinGW version is not 100% standards compliant ...

Actually, gcc is said to be the most compliant (to ANSI C++ standards)
major C++ compiler around. Mingw, however, is not a full implementation
of gcc. It depends on a certain Microsoft dll (msvcrt.dll - Microsoft's C
runtime library) to generate Windows console programs, and therefore has
the limitations of that dll. Mingw is even less complete for Windows
programs, because of the w32api libraries and "include" files it uses. 

It should be noted that all the major compilers (Borland C++ 5.5, MSVC++
6.0, gcc 3.11, etc) go way beyond mere ANSI compliance, and that their
additional features do not make them non-compliant. None of them are 100%
ANSI compliant, however, with the least compliant said to be MSVC++ 6.0.

The bottom line is that, at the beginner's level (which generally means
console programs) there is very little difference between the major
compilers. You simply have to learn the peculiarities of your
compiler/operating system combination. Given this, gcc (or mingw) is just
as good as any other compiler for compiling console programs.

Norm