Dev-C++ Is a Low Memory Windows Native C++ IDE Built in Delphi | Hacker News Reader

Dev-C++ Is a Low Memory Windows Native C++ IDE Built in Delphi

blogs.embarcadero.com

154 pointsxeeeeeeeeeeenu80 comments

Dev-cpp, mingw, and allegro where my gateway drug back in 2000 or so, nice to hear it’s still around.

> Dev-cpp, mingw, and allegro where my gateway drug back in 2000 or so, nice to here it’s still around.

Same, when I saw Dev-cpp, my first thought was "bloodshed.net"; I'm glad to see a fork alive and well. This IDE in particular was a stepping stone/turning point in my career.

Me too. I haven't heard anything regarding bloodshed dev-c++ for ages, perhaps over a decade by now. Talk about a blast from the past. I still recall cutting my C++ teeth with dev-c++ writing small opengl+win32 apps with it, and struggling to find where the bloody triangle was showing up. Using dev-c++ made that experience much more enjoyable. Good times.

Blast from the past for me too - especially the 'bloodshed' part. Haven't heard that name in years.

Same here! I went to a computer camp in 1999 (age 12) and started learning C++. Not able to pay for either CodeWarrior (what the camp used) or Visual C++, I stumbled across Dev-C++ on bloodshed.net and for years it became my go-to. Memories.

yes, same! I remember being a child and thinking it was so bizarre that they called it "bloodshed" dev c++ but i didn't care, i was having the time of my life.

Same, middle school here. Took a game dev course over the summer through the local technical college. The book recommended it, IIRC. Ran it the little bit I was still somewhat on Windows before switching fully to Linux. Now it is vim and gcc...

Me too. IIRC, there is no free IDE on windows at that time. I used Turbo C and Visual studio 6/.NET at school. Then I find Dev-C++, finally I can code anywhere.

I'm still using Allegro to make games (although it's worth noting that it received a major overhaul with Allegro 5).

Me too. If only I had a better book than Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours or whatever, I might've been a decent programmer.

Same! (Although not allegro.) It's so good to know that various forks of Dev-Cpp are still kicking around.

This is the same wave of nostalgia I felt a little while ago when there was a post about the Digital Mars compiler...

Swap allegro with SDL and you’ve got my start to programming, at age ~14.

I remember this as total pain to use compared to CodeBlocks 10 years ago, but if Embarcadero improved it and kept it low memory it can be pretty usable in our schools which often have 10 years old PCs with 2GB of RAM etc...,

I remember thinking the reverse, 14-15 years ago.

Exactly. Dev was so light, CB seemed clunky and dated to me. I had Dev on my flash drive and all my projects (didn't know about VC 2007).

> I remember this as total pain to use compared to CodeBlocks 10 years ago

We have radically different memories then. Bloodshed dev-c++ was always the lightest and snappiest C++ IDE around.

I think the 10 years is the key here. 15+ years ago the DevC++ was a gem, lightweight, fast usable IDE. But 10 years ago there was the free VSExpress out (not even the first, 2005 and 2008) which was far superior to DevC++ imho. (edit: on Windows)

I was going back to home town from college and we were not having internet at home. I remember I downloaded Dev-c++ before going back and a book on c++ just for fun. Compiling my first program took 2 days ( no net, no similar friend circle ) !! Best 2 days of my life.

Dev-c++ was my first proper IDE, happy to see it around.

Any particular reason why these two posts were rendered dead?

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H_Pylori 1 hour ago [dead] [–]

Back in the day, Dev-C++ was the ideal IDE for the C/C++ beginner. Simple, easy to use and very light in term of resources. I remember being able to run Dev-C++ on a 166Mhz Pentium I with 32Mb of RAM (which was hopelessly obsolete even by then). You could even install C libraries automatically as DevPaks.

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ku-man 9 hours ago [dead] [–]

Wow, Dev-C++...

Let me see 2004 to 2020... I am old...

Looks like something in their post history got them the equivalent of shadowbanned on HN.

First one is no longer dead so it was rescued. Second one doesn't add anything useful.

I am not sure if all these are manual or some sort of flag / downvoted automated process. But generally speaking it is doing a pretty good job.

I've probably used 2 dozen IDEs over the entire time I've been writing code. But Dev-cpp will ALWAYS have a special place.

I wonder what's the motivation behind this fork. Embarcadero is the company currently maintaining and selling Delphi dev tools. They also have their own commercial C++ IDE. Is it treated as demo App for their own toolchain.

> Embarcadero Dev-C++ has a low memory footprint because it is a native Windows application and does not use Electron.

Seems like they're using it as a VS Code offering/counter.

Which is great, looking forward to have less Electron fat on my computer.

One reason is that it made a great case study for modernizing an app from Delphi 7 to the latest version.

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/embarcadero-dev-c-successfully...

I have to wonder- why are there photoshopped stock pictures featuring the IDE?

Somehow the IDE being written in Delphi makes a good fit with stock imagery. Maybe because both appeal to a certain audience?

Big fan of CLion myself but I think that serves a different niche.

I remember replacing it with wxDevC++ [1] in our university labs.

I was really awesome and our students loved it a lot.

[1] http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/

Darn typo! /facepalm...

IT was awesome, not "I" -_- ugh my nerves!

This is another fork with different set of active commits: https://github.com/royqh1979/Dev-CPP

wow, Delphi, that brings back memories. It must be one of the most mature products on the market by now.

the IDE looks awesome btw, I guess the main advantage vs. VS is that it's hackable.

How is it more hackable than VS?

I don't think Visual Studio is "hackable" at all. Are you thinking of Visual Studio Code? Aren't the two very different? The first is a very large and commercial Windows application written by Microsoft and the latter is a free/open-source IDE with numerous plugins written as an electron app.

This is true. Visual Studio isn't particularly hackable. It sure is very configurable though.

I agree, VS isn't very much hackable, but, is Delphi any more hackable either?

TDM-GCC is such a better solution for Windows than normal MinGW ports. Geany + TDM-GCC is an ideal setup for introductory programming.

I used to recommend TDM, but it doesn't get updated very often. These days I would say that https://nuwen.net/mingw.html is a much better bet, particularly in view of all the libraries that come with it.

I loved this thing back when I was using Windows. Brings back good memories to hear about it again.

(good memories of the IDE, not the OS)

Wow, Dev-C++. Not the very first IDE I used (that would be Div2), but at least the very first IDE I needed to use for academical reasons, back in 2001. This is the IDE where I started committing serious mistakes, i.e. the ones that make a lightbulb turn on when you finally solve them.

I was a big fan of Delphi.Would be interested in a python IDE that could build phone apps from them.

There is a Python IDE built in Delphi called PyScripter. Doubt it has anything specific for phone apps though.

https://github.com/pyscripter/pyscripter

I used it lightly. It was nice. Remember it being fast at least for my light usage, compiling simple UNIX-style commmand-line utilities (to achieve small tasks) that I used to love to write on Windows - and still do :)

While I'm on the subject of command-line utilities, here is a post on my blog about a tutorial I wrote for IBM developerWorks on the topic of "Developing a Linux command-line utility" in C:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-ar...

Ahh.. nice to know after many years, eventually it's updated.

It's my IDE of choice many many years ago when I just started learning C/C++ on Windows.

Does it have a step by step debugger with automatic variable visualisation? If it had that feature then it would be a killer ide for c++.

Nicely done. There were many a times I had wished they had shipped this to Linux as well :)

On Windows it is mostly meh in my opinion as it is hard to compete with the Visual Studio feature wise. Had they ported it to Linux I'd be way more interested. I am not particularly fond of native C++ IDE choices on Linux. Currently using CodeLite for that purpose.

You double click the icon. And then you start typing code. Visual Studio has never been quite that fast.

It may not have as comprehensive a feature set as VS. But it's an excellent hackable IDE for enthusiasts.

I will have to disagree here. Visual Studio's C++ tools are fundamental for any C++ development beyond toy "hello world" and prototypes. I've been a Linux user for 8 years now and my biggest pain is the lack of a proper C++ IDE with decent debugging. Even if you forget an IDE, there are no decent debuggers[0][1].

[0]: https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/looking-for-debugger/

[1]: https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/looking-for-debugger-...

To be clear, the posts you are referencing are about debugging an executable with no source code available, which is not the normal use case for a programmer.

It seems you have not read the post or you don't have experience with gdb or with Linux debuggers/ide combos. He's debugging zig, but his issues are with the ux and iirc he mentions few zig-specific bugs. I have been through the same ordeals while debugging C++ on Linux. In the end, there's only gdb with a command line interface. Couldn't get any nice IDE with watch, memory view or even simple breakpoints to work. Some have a few of those features but none has all of them working. Eg. if you have a working breakpoint it'll fail to properly inspect STL containers etc.

I'm sure there are many people saying "works on my machine", but it never worked on any of mine, sadly. Visual Studio simply works and has a nice, intuitive interface. Pressing F10 to step over will always be better than typing something in the gdb command line and hitting Enter.

Have you tried CLion?

I'm not sure that Visual Studio is particularly good at debugging zig either...

I haven’t had any trouble doing graphical debugging with VSCode and the C/C++ plugin. I get breakpoints, locals, watch, etc. The one thing I miss from Visual Studio is being able to easily change the watch window display format (e.g. showing a number as hex).

VS is definitely one of the better C++ IDE's (if you're programming on Windows, at least); but I've found CLion to be a decent alternative on Linux (and macOS, but I just don't like XCode).

I'm curious, have you checked out JetBrain's CLion? while not free, it's pretty much the best CPP IDE out there, as it's usually the case with JetBrain in general.

I use C++ to mostly to develop backend servers. Since I use multiplatform libraries all active development and debugging happens actually on Windows. I maintain parallel project for CodeLite and makefile on Linux. Normally after I satisfied with the results on Windows I just click a button that triggers my build/test/deploy pipeline. From here all happens automatically but if the tests on Linux fail I would then fire up CodeLite to debug and find the reason. Mind you during last year I only had to do it twice. If I add/remove files / libraries this would be another reason to launch CodeLite to adjust Linux project accordingly. In theory I could do this on using CMake but it is simply not worth it for me.

I tried CLion and bugs / crashes with debugging and some other parts (do not remember exactly as it's been a while) prevented me from using it. Was not fond of its sluggishness either.

I think there is a level of familiarity bias that happens with debugging tools. I could probably get away with making gdb my login shell I live in it so much, and when I find myself using Visual Studio's debugger, I find it incredibly clunky. The things people complain about for gdb (e.g. you can't see the source code for where it is executing) I don't find to be a big deal (I just jump to the correct line in my text editor). Meanwhile, using Visual Studio is a complete pain for me, for reasons that clearly don't matter to people who use Visual Studio all the time (e.g. while possible, running multiple instances of a program side by side is annoying, quickly evaluating arbitrary expressions is more painful, setting data breakpoints is needlessly complicated (do they still ask if it is C or C++?), etc.

I think it must just be one of those things where the tool you use shapes the way you work, and so then when you switch tools, but try to work in the same way, you get frustrated.

I find windbg a good middle ground between the gdb/lldb style and visual studio overload.

source debugging is a minor component of GUI debuggers.

Having a graphical watch window with multiple variables, looking at registers in a different window while stepping through etc. is invaluable to me.

Also stuff like losing mental context because of dumping a long stack in the same window where I was just inspecting disassembly is frigging painful.

But I agree about familiarity bias in most cases.

QtCreator might be worth trying. It's focused on Qt apps, but it's a general C++ IDE. KDevelop is another one. I don't know if these would fit your purposes or not, but I'd be interested in hearing.

I agree totally. No one else has ever been able to make a debugger as good as Visual Studio. That's why I do all my core development work on Visual Studio, and only use XCode / code blocks for testing on Mac/Linux.

ugh, QtCreator is so much better especially than Xcode, and not even worth comparing to Code::Blocks

but what if you aren't using Qt?

QtCreator is a generic C/C++ IDE, built with Qt. (and since it has language server support nowadays it looks like it's useable for rust, etc). It has a profiling UI, valgrind support, etc etc.

It's also pretty decent for embedded!

Sometimes I feel they should rebrand it, because many people are blocked by the Qt name.

I better check it out then. Thanks.

The C++ debugger for vscode is pretty good, no visual studio but much less utilitarian than gdb.

I just checked. From cold start it takes 3 seconds for me to start typing in Visual Studio in my current project.

Dev C++ might be faster in this particular matter (been a very big while since I've used it so can't really verify) but I would not trade loosing 3 seconds a day for the whole shebang of features that are way more robust and plentiful in Visual Studio.

In 2020, yes. It's 3 seconds. But in the glory days of DevC++ (when it was managed by Bloodshed), it was a heck of a lot longer than 3 secs.

Not to mention, DevC++ was free. VS was not.

I'm not saying Dev C++ is better than VS. It was just a solid choice for it's loyal community of users.

Yes I remember there was a time when Dev C++ especially Orwell fork made much sense. I am talking about now though.

I used kdevelop a long time ago and really loved it. I heard it also improved a lot recently

At the time when VC++ 6 was the standard, it was worth frigging with Bloodshed if you didn't have $$$, an MSDN subscription, or some other access. Once there were the Express Editions and now VS Community Edition, it's really hard to justify the hassle for a second-rate set of tooling, unless you enjoy shaving yaks.

What's a decent Delphi (Object Pascal) IDE for *nix?

Lazarus is great.

Yes. Example small app I created using it: Digital Clock created in FreePascal / Lazarus:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/04/digital-clock-created-in...

Lazarus and Free Pascal are the free and open source alternatives to Delphi. There's also FMXLinux:

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/create-powerful-linux-applicat...

Source: I'm a satisfied user of Delphi, but only currently uses Professional and haven't tried out FMXLinux yet.

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