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Excerpts from netnews.comp.sys.next.software: 29-Oct-92 Re: NeXTStep
query by Ronald P. Blanford@spf.t 
> The development environment you get with Borland C++ for DOS is  
> miles ahead of NeXT in terms of compilation speed,  
> interactivity, ease of use, debugging ability, and project  
> management.  InterfaceBuilder is good, but Unix tools in general  
> lag far behind commercial DOS offerings for usability.

Let's seperate these issues a little to make things clearer.

1) C++ versus Objective-C.

I claim that Obj-C is a far superior language than C++.  This is because
C++ is a front end that translates C++ code into straight (if ugly)
standard C code.  C++ does not provide the kind of run-time environment
that Obj-C does.  For example, you simply cannot do dynamic loading of
objects in C++.

2) Compilation speed.  NeXT computers really need more than 8MB or RAM
in order to do compiles with any efficiency.  If you've been comparing
8MB NeXT's versus 8MB PC's, then yes, the PC will win.  Once you get
more memory, though, the NeXT should win out.

Remember that the system libraries on a NeXT are larger than those on a
PC.  Also note that the NeXT uses shared libraries, which is a big win
in terms of the size of the executables.  PC's don't have that, as far
as I know.

3) Interactivity, ease of use, debugging, project management.

Heh.  You have seen Project Builder and the IB under NS 3.0?  I simply
can't see how you can claim that there is an easier development
enviroment for creating a great user interface than IB.   The last time
I saw a Borland product (last year, straight C, I think), they had
nothing that could compare.

How can you claim that a PC has a better debugging enviroment than a
unix machine?  Once your program mangles memory because of a bad pointer
on a PC, the machine goes down, and you have to reboot.  The NeXT
implements memory protection, so that a bad process *cannot* corrupt
memory outside of its address space.  Speaking of which, remember that
every process on a NeXT has 4 Gigabytes of virtual address space
available.  Do PC's have any kind of virtual memory?  If so, describe
it.  Furthermore, how can you debug the operating system on a PC? 
NeXT's offers networked debugging where one machine runs the kernel &
the other runs kgdb.

If you need more functionality than what Project Builder offers, you can
use tools like RCS (Revision Control System) to maintain a complex
project.  Check out RCS before you claim that unix machines don't offer
good project management software.  Also, please describe what Borland
offers for project management.

I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I'd be very interested in
hearing how you can justify your claim that Borland C++ offers a better
development environment than NeXTstep.

-Chuck


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