Microsoft has released - at no cost - the Visual C++ toolkit 2003 which includes the command line version of MS Visual C++, so at last the platform compiler for Windows is freely available. Let a thousand open source IDE's sprout.
I guess this was a logical consequence of the fact that the .NET sdk was free anyway and MS is going the CLR way. The release of this toolkit is great news for projects such as perl. At last everyone can build perl properly, which means that at last CPAN is a real opportunity for the common windows user. IMHO, considering how well many perl modules build just from CPAN distributions, this makes Activestate perl a lot less appealing, even if ppm's still are easier to use when available.
Open source projects on Windows just got a lot simpler to distribute. Next step up would be just including the compiler with the windows distribution like all unixes do.
[UPDATE] Bo points out that you might also want the debugger download to go with the compiler. That too is free as in beer.
Posted by Claus at May 11, 2004 10:26 PM | TrackBack (0)emacs
Posted by: Bo on May 12, 2004 9:55 AMThis may sound funny from a vi user, but I simply don't want to learn what Meta-X-Meta-C-Meta-W-Meta-Q means and how that is different from Meta-X-Meta-C-Meta-W-Meta-T
Posted by: Dee on May 12, 2004 9:58 AM[esc]:q! ... and the difference is ?
The joke stealer is at it again. Please read very carefully, Bo: "This may sound funny from a vi user"...
But actually, there's twice as many keys in play in your example, actually because of the Meta key I need to care about.
I used to be a happy emacs user, but in the end it just disagreed with me. Too much magic going on in the emacs setups I've been using...
yes it sounds very funny when it comes from a vi user, but it sounds even more funny - coming from a dude who has bougt the vi book :)
Posted by: Bo on May 13, 2004 10:21 AM