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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.
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."
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
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.
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.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
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.
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.