I'm (Re)Learning C Before It's Too Late

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Back in the day I used LCC-Win32 as my main development platform. It was rather cool to have such a nice compiler/IDE for free. Extremely fast, produced small binaries, had a nice debugger, code completion and API reference at the press of a button. Everything VS had (except C++ obviously) in about 10mb of memory. Also, it used to include extra documents explaining how the author went about writing the code editor, the compiler, the IDE, and the history of the whole thing.

I used Pelles C for a while, mainly for Windows CE development. Although the IDE was nice, I still preferred LCC-Win32 for Windows development. I have no idea how both environments have progressed in the last 4 years or so.

Check LCC-Win32 here: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32/

There's a pretty nice C tutorial there too at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32/C-Tutorial.pdf

Yep. BTW, forgot to say that LCC-Win32 came with some really cool libraries to do BigInt maths, and later included the CCL, which is a library of containers (linked list, hash tables, etc.) Obviously nothing approximating Boost, but it was good enough if you wanted to avoid having to code your own linked list every time (let's face it: after you've learned how most data structures work it's kind of boring and risky to reimplement every time.)

Edit: actually it seems the CCL is still mostly just a bunch of docs. Meh.

If you're on Windows and in need of a solid C/C++ compiler, may I suggest Open Watcom:

http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Main_Page

I believe they have binaries for Linux as well these days but I haven't tried them yet.

Thanks for the suggestion...can you compare/contrast it to Pelles C?

Why "before it's too late"? Why should an older person no longer be capable of learning C?

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