Subject: Re: Win 95 console business
From: [email-masked] (Ben Constable)

5 Nov 1997 21:47:54 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>

>How quickly do bugs get fixed in VC++? Windows Developer's Journal has a
>column called "Bug++ of the month". The answer - who knows? Maybe months,
>a year...with GPL'd software, it gets fixed either immediately or within
>a week or so (although sometimes the fixes cause more bugs because people
>sometimes patch like hell without considering that something needs to be
>redesigned).

Go to www.microsoft.com and you will find a portion of their site devoted to
reporting bugs and their fixes. I have found a few compiler bugs, and the
site had all of them, as well as workarounds.

And I have been on this mailing list for a long time, and I have seen the
same bugs come up again and again for months and years.

>And...public and free software, once it reaches a certain critical mass,
tends
>to attract lots of good developers and users, and it will outstrip most of
>the commercial software in its domain. Emacs certainly does...gimp is
getting
>there, GAP is already there, and I'm sure you could name others. So yes,
>I think VC++ is much better in some respects than gcc, but they do have
>different goals, and it might not be the case in the future.

I agree that they have different goals, and that is exactly what I have
said. I just personally find VC++ to be tuned over the span of nearly ten
years to windows development. How old is gnu-win32?

The bare fact the MS writes the operating system means that they will have
an advantage in writing development tools, and these days they use that
advantage a lot (back in the old days they didn't).

Ben Constable
[email-masked]

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