Easiest Cheapest way for C++ Dev on AmiOS?

[Dietmar]

> [gcc] Sucks how exactly?

It's very very slow and there is no souce level debugger for gcc.

[Dietmar]

Is SAS/C compiler freely downloadable nowadays? If it is, where can I download it? Thanks.

No. A reasonable free alternative would be vbcc. vbcc doesn't have its own debugger but that is made up by the support for morphos and other PPC targets.

[Dietmar]

H&P StormC V3 is quite useless: It's buggy and generates slow code. V4 is just IDE for gcc.

That's not exactly true, AFAIK: StormC4 is not just a frontend for gcc but adds very useful components that are not freely available, such as a debugger and run-time environment etc. Even if it were "just" an IDE, an IDE can be a very useful thing to increase your productivity, compared to a bare-bones gcc.

[Dietmar]

You need to also remember that vbcc doesn't do c++, just c.

Yes, as is SAS/C (unless you consider its preprocessor as a serious C++ development platform, which I don't).

[Dietmar]

It's not that slow, on up to date computer.

I've tried gcc 2.95.3 and it's a snail. I've tried it on a 1.4Ghz PC. Compared to SAS/C on the same computer, it's so slow that I couldn't imagine using it for serious development. Of course such a decision very much depends on your programming style. I like to compile often with full optimization.

Source level debugger: gdb

Well, I'm aware that there is a program with that name in the gcc tree but I just can't get it to work :-)  I'd very much appreciate some comments on gdb: does it work, is it any good, what do you do if it reports that it can't find symbols ?

[Dietmar]

Not tremedously cheap, but compared to what it used to cost I suppose it's ok.

If your currency conversion is correct (100 US$),  then it's massively overpriced. It's available for 49,95 directly from the manufacturer.