Comment by herewulf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by herewulf | Hacker News Reader

As great as this looks, I think it should heavily emphasize moving on to using GCC (or maybe LLVM).

I learned C in the mid nineties using a copy of Visual C++ 1.0 that a friend had gotten from his father (and probably he got it from work). It was the only compiler I knew of and once I was ready to move beyond toy programs, I was seriously hampered by the fact that this compiler couldn't produce text mode executables (any call to printf opened its own new window that definitely wasn't cmd.exe) and it couldn't set the graphics mode for blitting pixels. It was heavily oriented around this new fangled MFC thing but I was a teenager so I wanted to program games not business apps or whatever. That meant I wanted text mode or graphics mode.

My high school CS class had Borland C++ and I could set mode 0x13 with that in DOS. But I had no way of obtaining this compiler as a kid. And it probably didn't work on Windows 95 anyway.

Anyways, it wasn't until the early 2000s that I finally learned about GCC, a free as in beer and freedom compiler and the simplicity of it would have been amazing for learning.. If only I had known.

> I was seriously hampered by the fact that this compiler couldn't produce text mode executables (any call to printf opened its own new window that definitely wasn't cmd.exe) and it couldn't set the graphics mode for blitting pixels.

This is incorrect. Visual C++ definitely could do all those things, it was in no way a toy. You probably had it mis-configured somehow.

I stole my copy of Borland C++ from school.

But as mesmerized as I was by C++ at the time, Borland Pascal was a lot more fun to play around with. I remember unsuccessfully trying to wrap my head around the different kinds of pointers, and the humble beginnings of std.

Even the first of Visual C++ was a professional C/C++ compiler. That's been the same Microsoft compiler they've been selling for years for $500. The previous version was just called Microsoft C/C++ 7.0.

It wasn't in any way a "toy". What I think you're talking about is that Microsoft was pushing the "Visual" aspect of the IDE that it was trying to copy from Visual Basic, but with MFC, and was doing a sucky job at it. You didn't have to use it. Most of us didn't.

Same here. Highschool programming class was a lot of fun, learning all the basics for the first time, but I too thought the first step of being a programmer was to obtain a Microsoft product.

Probably same years… whenever we got a new computer I was removing OS shipped and installing a previous MS OS. Win3.1? Nah I want DOS, win95 nah… I want 3.1. That’s where my tools were.

Funny thing I still use win10.

funny how much the tools you first get comfortable with shape everything after. even today, setting up a simple clean c environment is way harder than it should be for beginners. tutorials like this help, but eventually pointing people toward gcc or clang early on makes a huge difference long term.

I totally see what you mean but after 30 years of experience, I couldn’t put it that way. Even the simplest editor and a command line was enough for the “hello world!”.

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