RE: [GD-General] dev environments

[Tom N. <t.n...@vr...>]

Hi,

I find Borland's Delphi IDE to be pretty hard to beat. It has a very
elaborate class library behind it, including a comprehensive GUI
construction toolkit. You hardly ever need to mess with the Win32 API,
there's no need for MFC or ActiveX controls or whatever, and the
graphical GUI editing works great. It's like Visual Basic, only without
the disadvantages :-)

The Object Pascal language behind Delphi is, in my modest opinion, also
a step up from C++. Coincidentally, I believe it originated on the Mac
-- is there a pattern emerging here? I don't know if Apple still uses it
today, though. Perhaps it got replaced by Obj-C?

Finally, there's also a Linux version available ("Kylix"). I have no
personal experience with this, but I've had reports from people who
compiled the OpenGL demos from my website on Linux, without significant
problems.

> When they added 
> auto-completion for members when typing "." or "->" on a 
> member -- wow, how helpful is THAT? Or being able to click on 
> something and say "Show me your definition".

Yeah, except "Show me your definition" only works _after_ you've
compiled the project with browse info. If you wipe out your "Debug" and
"Release" directories, your browsing abilities are gone. Delphi allows
you to browse your code at _all_ times, compiled or not, and even if you
_would_ have to compile it, it'd take about two seconds to do a complete
rebuild of your entire project, as opposed to several minutes if you
were using VC++.

Oh, and did I mention that you can get Delphi for free? :-)

-- Tom