How and where and when ect...

[ExtremePimpness]

I am a VB programmer and I am looking to get heavily into VC++ where should I start, Should I wait for .NET, and are ther any really good sites out there for VC++?


Also how are VB and VC++ similar?

Any comments are welcome.

Regards
E.P.

http://forums.vb-world.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39206

[Vlatko]

Actually VC++ is not a language , it is an IDE. C++ is the language. This is the same as Delphi(IDE) - Turbo Pascal(language) and many others.

[ExtremePimpness]

good point i never thought of it that way. :)

Going by your exact question, Assembly is definitly the best. Smaller and faster results. Now alot of people would say that computers are so fast that assembly programming isnt needed. Well people like that have no idea what they are talking about, and they have probably never learned assembly. HLL's like C++, have their place in the programing world for small applications, but if your going to make one like Microsft Word, or Internet Explorer, assembly is the way to go. Even though Microsoft wrote them in C++ (Microsft is getting VERY lazy). Sorry for any typos, i had to type quickly.

[ExtremePimpness]

but think of how long it would take to write an OS like WIndows or MacOS (Don't Like it but is a good example) in Assembly

Well, right now it takes about 2 to 3 years to make the Windows O/S, and its slow, big and full of errors. Well i think if they spent the next 5 to 10 years developing the next Windows O/S in assembly, the results would be well worth it. Rewriting the O/S would also give them a chance to work out the already known bugs!

It would be insane to write the whole OS in Assembly. Of course the results would be spectacular, but it would be really time consuming. It's a much better idea to combine both C++ and Assembly to make the OS. That's what Microsoft with windows. Sure windows is full of errors and bugs, but there's no doubt about it that it's the most popular OS out there.

The reason Windows is slow is because of the size of the o/s, if you did it entirely in asm, the size would be so much smaller and older computers could run it! that shoud be reason enough.

There's no way you're going to get a good OS that's 10 MB or so. It needs to be big.

I could say the same thing; If they hard coded it instead of using assembly or C++, it would be much faster. Well of couse it would be faster, but who has the time to do this...If Microsft did this, then it would probably take 5-10 years longer, thus computer technology would be delayed for that long, and we would still be here using Windows 3.1 right now.

Well we could argue this back and forth forever, so i heres my opinion...

Any operating system that is as large and as widely used as Windows should be coded in pure assembly for the good of the country!

[Dreamlax]

Originally posted by
There's no way you're going to get a good OS that's 10 MB or so. It needs to be big.

MacOS 7.0 came on 6 or 7 floppies, and that OS was great. MacOS 7.5.1 came on more floppies and that was even better. If I remember properly, MacOS 8.0 was the first MacOS ever to be released on a CD, and still didn't take up much room. My emulator (Basilisk) runs perfectly well with the 10MB Macintosh Operating System version 8.0.

Who's to say it needs to be big? Windows is only big because IBM compatibles are so variable. Some computers have this, and others don't, some computers have that, and others don't. That is why MacOS is so small, it's directed at computers where they know the hardware (which removes the excuse for OS crashes) and how it works.

[CornedBee]

The time consuming parts of windows are not in the OS core code. If they rewrote everything in assembly they would:
a) save about 5% disk space
b) get it running about 5% faster
c) have to spend 4 times as long developing it
d) have to spend 10 times as long hunting bugs

I believe that MS employs enough great programmers which can optimize good enough that the assembly advantage is really small. And I mean REALLY small.

I wouldn't vote for a best language, as all of them have their uses. C/C++ for everything, ASM to supplement C/C++ (in system-near areas and some small high-speed algorithms).

The worst here is VB IMO.
C# is mainly a Java clone, but the .NET framework makes it quite useful for quick application development and takes away the last of VB's uses.