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Re: Appeal to IBM for VisualAge productline to Linux



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


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