Borland C++ Now Free-as-in-Beer

BlueBlade writes, "Inprise, formerly known as Borland (and now merging with Corel) has released their latest compiler for free. They said the move was to show support for the open source community. You can find the full article here. " It's Free Beer though. No source code, although such a release would really show their support for the Open Source Community.

Comments

jeeze...

[PimpBot]

Its Free Beer tho. No source code, although such a release would really show their support for the Open Source Community.

Ever heard of being thankful for what you get? Borland makes quality stuff, and its great to see this come out. But, CmdrTaco, your comment sounds (at least to me) resentful. Lighten up a bit, ok?
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Re:jeeze...

[zorgon]

Agreed! C'mon, Rob, it's a compiler and libraries. Not everyone needs to work under the hood on that part of it all. Go forth and build cool open source stuff with it, said the voice of the meta-Philippe to the teeming masses. That's pretty darn supportive if ya ask me. I think "free beer" is a bit too derogatory, as every schoolchild knows you only rent or borrow beer and have to give most of it back in short order -- too much like a shrinkwrap license to me! Z.

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."

Re:jeeze...

[Signail11]

I'm sorry, but you obviously haven't compared the quality of the code generated by gcc with that generated by any Borland, Microsoft, or Intel's C compiler. Frankly, the commercial compilers blow gcc out of the water, even with pgcc -O6 -march=pentiumpro -fomit-frame-pointer -etc. gcc is *extremely* impressive for what it does, as it is portable to a zillion different OSes and CPUs, but this very portability makes it less than optimal at generating code for any one CPU. The internal RTL representation does not lend itself to the detailed modelling of the Intel x86 crappy archetecture so critical to acheiving good performance, especially with a stack-based FPU.

All the "Whining": My 2c

[Caspian]

I'd just like to state that the person who pointed out how Inprise/Borland has taken great pains to portray themselves as the benefactors of the "Open Source" community had a VERY good point. What is going on here is essentially the cheapening of what free software stands for. It used to be that people would use the term "free software"-- but that is all about freedom, which conjures up all sorts of unpleasant (at least, to Corporate America's eyes) imagery of scruffy revolutionaries sitting in smoky bars sipping cognac, and so the term "open source" was adopted by ESR, thereby dissociating the code from any immediately obvious social issues and turning it purely into a technical or economic issue. Alright, but then what? Then, all the companies that released even the slightest bit of information, or the smallest of binaries, started flinging about the word "Open"; now, here comes Borland (or whoever the hell owns them now) trying to paint themselves as being in the same boat as the "Open Source" community, while meanwhile all it is doing is giving away (after a mandatory registration AND a survey, I might add) a very much closed-source compiler, for Windows only (!!!), with no debugger?!

I fear that the logical continuation of this pattern is as follows-- since Borland has just established that by giving away free-beer-free goodies (not even necessarily whole software packages-- arguably, a development package is not complete without a debugger!) somehow puts one in the same boat as the Open Source/free software crowd, the next steps involve doing the same for (in order):

* Crippleware/nagware/software that times out after X days-- "But see, it's helping them until it expires! They can use it to create Open Source applications for 30 days!"

* Inexpensive software ("But see, it's cheap.. we're not greedy, so we're helping the Open Source community!")

And, eventually, anyone selling their piece of software for a few bucks less than their competitors will attempt to brand themselves as being pillars of the Open Source community...

But again, that's just my 2c.

Re:All the "Whining": My 2c

[nazerim]

* Crippleware/nagware/software that times out after X days-- "But see, it's helping them until it expires! They can use it to create Open Source applications for 30 days!"
* Inexpensive software ("But see, it's cheap.. we're not greedy, so we're helping the Open Source community!")

It's called shareware. And the press release doesn't say anything about being "the pillars of the open source community". They simply stated that a free ANSI C++ compiler is now available for the Open Source community to do as they wish. Nothing more, nothing less.

You might scoff at this, but note that there *is* no other freely available native compiler for ANSI C++ available for the Win32 platform. That's the significance of Borland's announcement. ANSI C++ is a very difficult animal to tame. Why are we all moaning? C'mon, cut them some slack, they're already making a Linux version of their software, no reason why C++ on their Linux beast won't compile on their Win32 toy.

We'll all reap the benefits, damnit.

reverse moderator psychology

[CoughDropAddict]

While we're griping, let me tell you about something that I'M sick of: whining about how sure you are you'll get moderated down, as a cheap shot at evoking the sympathy of the moderators.

From now on, whenever I'm a moderator, I'll specifically look for people who think they can buy a few karma points by making themselves look like martyrs for their opinions and I will moderate them down, like they supposedly expect to be anyway.

If you have an insightful comment to make, the least you can do is let it get moderated up by virtue of its thoughtfulness, without having to resort to begging.

Re:Anyone look at system requirements?

[Ronin Developer]

A port of BCC 5.5 to linux already exists. This was demonstrated at the 1999 Borland/Inprise Conference. Yes, the version released is for Windows. But, they demonstrated that they could run the same source through their Linux compiler, have it compile, and run as expected.

Borland is planning to release Kylix which includes (to my understanding) Delphi on Linux as well as C++ Builder for Linux.

If anyone has used their tools, you will find that they provide all the source code to the libraries (mainly the VCL). They don't include the source to the compilers or other tools (they need to make money somehow, right? Isn't that what for-profit corporations do?).

Nobody is forcing you to download the BCC. Nor, are they forcing you to visit their site. The fact that you went there says you are interested.

The only reasons I can think that they want to know who is downloading their compiler (i.e registration) and filling in the survey are:

1) Knowing if their marketing campaign is having an effect.

2) Being able to notify registered users when Kylix becomes available.

In a previous post, somebody griped about the BCC compiler stating that the Cygnus tools (even MS's own were preferable to BCC). The only downside I ever experienced using BCC was that many libraries in the Windows world simply would not link to it. But, I experienced the same problem with MS's and Symmantec's compilers as well. At least in the Linux world, there is a standard on how these libraries should be built. The Borland compilers should be compatible with other libraries on Linux. No?

So, why does everyone keep knocking Inprise/Borland for their approach of giving away the product?

Personally, it seems to me that too many people don't want to look at the good that can come from this. They expect everything to be free or a threat to their purist, unrealistic, view of the world. That's great for hobbiests. It doesn't make money. Or, perhaps they are staunch MS supporters who don't want to see Inprise/Borland succeed? Just read their posts and decide for yourself.

Probally because of IP

[dieman]

I bet they can't release the compiler because of IP issues within the compiler. That seems to be the number one reason of legacy software not being able to be released to public.

Malda: Not everyone has to go opensource. I think you need a little action with the clue-by-four.

Actually Borland is quite superior to GCC

[bbcat]

>With GCC you get a lot more optimizations and a
>lot more active development of the product.

What have you been sniffing?

I did some comparisions with my program compiled
with GCC and with Borland C++ 5.5

I had normal optimization with Borland and
highest optimization with GCC. I also compiled
with Visual Age for C++ with normal Optimization.

Size with GCC : 2.82M
Size with Borland : 1.18M
Size with IBM : 1.25M

The code with Borland is also slightly faster
than that of IBM and GCC code, GCC having
the slowest code and Borland the fastest.

My only complaint now that I figured out which
flags to use is that it doesn't support long long.

>With Borland 5.5 you only have Corel/Inprise
>developing it. Borland claims their 5.5 compiles
>code faster than GCC and their product does have
>precompiled headers.

All true. It is fast, it will be great to use
for Linux if it is just as good as the winblows
version. It'll be great when the C++ builder
and Delphi comes out as well.

Hands up everyone who doesn't get open source

[khiron]

Borland releasing a free version of the compiler does NOT mean that the compiler is Open Source. What it means numbskulls is that if you as a customer buy an open source product that is built using C Builder, and want to compile it, you do not need to buy the compiler. IF you want to make substantial changes then no doubt you will WANT to get all the source to the VCL which is after all 90% of a builder app and you will be glad to supports Borlands efforts by buying it. Borland's language products have ALWAYS had a strong following because they ship the source to most of their libraries (instead of enmiring you in evil activex, et al), heck TP3 shipped the source code for a spreadsheet as sample code. Borland was open source long before it was fashionable. Expect the compiler for Pascal to be released in the very near future (it is the same backend), and the Linux compilers (Kylix) to follow. The advantage for Open Source developers is that you can now release your shource freely knowing that there will allways be a refference compiler that is fully ANSI compliant, works equally with Windows and Linux (We've all got our fingers crossed that this will be true) and is fast. And if nobody buys Borlands products they dissapear.