Is Pelles C a dead fish?

[CommonTater]

a) Open Source gives much more motivation for more people to actively involve in a project, plus it gives them the chance to embed any improvements (and/or bugs ) right into the original code, with any implied pros and cons compared to external patching

It may, but it doesn't need to be like that.  You'd be surprised if you knew how  many 3rd party ideas have been incorporated into Pelles C over the years... The Open Resouce as text addin now sits as a menu choice in the resource editor, the WIN32_DEFAULT_LIBS idea was originally mine and is now part of the standard headers, and on and on. 

Even Open Source isn't really open source... most of these projects are governed by committees --often a commitee of one-- who decide what does and does not make the final cut.  The only real difference between commercial software departements and an Open Source project is that the commercial guys get paid for their work.

b) A platform that has officially dropped the use of a particular programming language for a long time, in favor of other langs and tools, has a huge negative impact in (not) motivating people to involve in a project that deals with that officially long dropped language. Especially when at least another popular platform(s) is evolving in parallel using that programming language as its point of reference (e.g Gnome/GNU)

This is merely a matter of perception and I dare say not a very smart perception.  How do you explain Free Pascal, D, Python, ADA and a dozen flavours of Basic?  Should those highly active projects just give it up and go home because Microsoft isn't using any of those languages?   

No offense my friend, but as a couple of us have pointed out your analysis is based on a flawed premise.

[migf1]

It may, but it doesn't need to be like that.  You'd be surprised if you knew how  many 3rd party ideas have been incorporated into Pelles C over the years... The Open Resouce as text addin now sits as a menu choice in the resource editor, the WIN32_DEFAULT_LIBS idea was originally mine and is now part of the standard headers, and on and on. 

Even Open Source isn't really open source... most of these projects are governed by committees --often a commitee of one-- who decide what does and does not make the final cut.  The only real difference between commercial software departements and an Open Source project is that the commercial guys get paid for their work.

The real question to be asked should be, imho: how will you convince more people to get involved? Obviously the examples your are mentioning, have not convinced more people to get involved for many years now (otherwise you wouldn't have posted your original question, I guess).

This is merely a matter of perception and I dare say not a very smart perception.  How do you explain Free Pascal, D, Python, ADA and a dozen flavours of Basic?  Should those highly active projects just give it up and go home because Microsoft isn't using any of those languages?   

No offense my friend, but as a couple of us have pointed out your analysis is based on a flawed premise.

No offense tater, but I can very easily direct your "flawed premise" argument toward your analysis. Most, of the toolsets you are listing above to support your analysis are either cross-platform by nature or they provide cross-platform development tools and/or environments. Pelles-C simply does not.

[migf1]

Well, I wouldn't say that Pelles C is the only development environment for plain C on Windows. Mingw combined with really powerful free IDEs, like Code::Blocks, Netbeans, Eclipse, and others are perfectly valid choices too, having their own pros & cons compared to Pelles C and/or VS Exp.

Sorry, but those are based on C++ compilers (which just happen to compile plain C, in most cases), and have also their heritage in the GNU/*ix world.

Nope, that's not true! gcc is a pure C compiler (g++ is a pure C++ compiler). Let me remind you (or inform you, if your are not already aware of it) that GCC was originally an acronym for "GNU C Compiler", exactly because it was exactly a C compiler only (I was using it as a student back then, in late '80s). Support for other languages came later on, and thus the GCC "interpretation" was changed to "GNU Compiler Collection".

So gcc does not "just happen" to compile plain C, it is a pure C compiler. g++ is a C++ compiler that happens to compile some plain C code (as most c++ compilers do).

There isn't another straight C compiler out there (ok, lcc, which Pelle's C in based on in the past) for Windows...

Ralf

That's not true either! You may wish to have a look at this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compilers#C_compilers.

[CommonTater]

No offense tater, but I can very easily direct your "flawed premise" argument toward your analysis. Most, of the toolsets you are listing above to support your analysis are either cross-platform by nature or they provide cross-platform development tools and/or environments. Pelles-C simply does not.

Yes, you're correct... Pelles C is not a cross-platform tool.

However, you seem to be missing one crucial point ...  We don't want it to be cross-platform.  Get it?  Cross-platform development is not one of Pelles C's goals... nor should it be.  It is designed to be Windows Specific and IMO it needs to stay that way. 
 
In fact, I don't give two warm sh_ts what happens on any other OS... if Pelle opens it up and goes "cross-platform" with it, I'll drop it like a hot potato.

[CommonTater]

Can we, maybe, get back to the original discussion...
Seriously, I don't think trying to sell cross-platform ideologies or ASM's superiority is helping the discussion one bit.

I would like to see some honest discussion of if and how we should work to support Pelles C...
If it's dead, lets let it die a graceful death of neglect (as it is now).
If it's not dead, lets get behind it and bring some life to the project.
 

[migf1]

No offense tater, but I can very easily direct your "flawed premise" argument toward your analysis. Most, of the toolsets you are listing above to support your analysis are either cross-platform by nature or they provide cross-platform development tools and/or environments. Pelles-C simply does not.

Yes, you're correct... Pelles C is not a cross-platform tool.

However, you seem to be missing one crucial point ...  We don't want it to be cross-platform.  Get it?  Cross-platform development is not one of Pelles C's goals... nor should it be.  It is designed to be Windows Specific and IMO it needs to stay that way. 
 
In fact, I don't give two warm sh_ts what happens on any other OS... if Pelle opens it up and goes "cross-platform" with it, I'll drop it like a hot potato.

Of course I get it!

Well, in that case I sincerely wish you all the luck in motivating people to invest their free time in an outdated approach of developing Windows software. Even for bringing it up to or close to the VS Express standards (and/or free IDEs+mingw standards) explicitly for the Windows platform.

[Bitbeisser]

Nope, that's not true! gcc is a pure C compiler (g++ is a pure C++ compiler). Let me remind you (or inform you, if your are not already aware of it) that GCC was originally an acronym for "GNU C Compiler", exactly because it was exactly a C compiler only (I was using it as a student back then, in late '80s). Support for other languages came later on, and thus the GCC "interpretation" was changed to "GNU Compiler Collection".

So gcc does not "just happen" to compile plain C, it is a pure C compiler. g++ is a C++ compiler that happens to compile some plain C code (as most c++ compilers do).

Sorry, you are missing the point here...
Yes, GCC/gcc stands for quite a while for "GNU Compiler Collection", but my point is if you feed a mix of C and C++ code to it (g++ as the executioner, AFAIK at least since GCC4, there is no separate C compiler executable anymore), it will happily do so, unless you get wild with command line switches to force "C only". That doesn't not fit IMHO the definition of a pure C compiler...
Not to mention that none of the GCC compilers is in fact a true Windows compiler either, the all need to use a crutch of a *ix porting library to produce Windows programs...

There isn't another straight C compiler out there (ok, lcc, which Pelle's C in based on in the past) for Windows...

That's not true either! You may wish to have a look at this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compilers#C_compilers.

So, which one to be precisely? At least considering the same price tag and functionality...

Ralf

[Bitbeisser]

In fact, I don't give two warm sh_ts what happens on any other OS... if Pelle opens it up and goes "cross-platform" with it, I'll drop it like a hot potato.

Well, on the other hand, you quite happily picked it up, despite the additional support for ARM/Windows CE... 

IMHO, opening up Pelle's C doesn't have to mean that there has to be a Pelle's C for Linux or Pelle's C for Mac, there are already plenty entrenched tools out there, no need to add to the mix. Instead there should be a concentrated effort to solidify the Windows environment.

But as I mentioned, dropping the certainly outdated Windows CE and instead use (and enhance) the existing ARM compiler to support cross-development (on Windows) for the Raspberry Pi could attract more users that otherwise wouldn't be really aware of it...

Ralf

[CommonTater]

Well, on the other hand, you quite happily picked it up, despite the additional support for ARM/Windows CE... 

At the time (ver 2.90) that wasn't seen as a separate OS, it was depicted as an extension of windows for mobile devices and shared many features of windows.

Instead there should be a concentrated effort to solidify the Windows environment.

Which is what I've been saying all along....

CE is depricated since 6.5 ... and I doubt it will be missed when/if Pelle finally removes it. 

[frankie]

I would like to expose some of my personal opinions in the hope they will be taken into consideration.
PellesC is a compiling suite created by Orinius Pelle a very smart swedish guy, who by himself wrote a bunch of software producing a very nice development environment targeted to MS world.
Pelle aim over all these years has been to stay as tight as possible to MS standards. The point was: whatever C project made for MS win (desktop or CE) should strightforfward compile on his suite.
Pelle also want not move to C++.
He offered the whole software free for any use, and in the meantime got some money selling sources to those who want them.
To free users was asked just to help development by testing code and reporting bugs.
While I don't know what would be the conditions if you buy sources (I mean if any support is included), for free use, even if donation was made, it should have been clear that the product was offered 'AS IS owned software'.
Pelle always programmed his suite as he liked, apparently accepting some suggestions and refusing many others. I said apparently because what was accepted in the 99% of cases was something present on MS suit.

His first long absence from the forum was when, very excited by the new IA64-AMD64 architecture, finally come back with a 64bits version.

Then maybe the decreasing interest in C projects from MS, maybe personal problems (his father had heart problems last year), maybe work and whatever else made him busy elsewhere.
Anyway this product is Pelle's child and he has the right to do with it whatever he wants, although he never let users with an outdated version (one that doesn't include all features to compile with last MS-WIN version).
Maybe he is working on Win8 

Finally if you like PellesC suite you must take it as is..... 

[jj2007]

The point was: whatever C project made for MS win (desktop or CE) should straightforward compile on his suite.

That is already a very reasonable goal. I don't code a lot in C, but whenever I find a code snippet on the web that I'd like to see in action, VS Express tells me it has to convert this incredibly old project, then it tries conversion, and fails miserably

Pelle's C succeeded in several cases where VS failed. Now the point is that there must be tons and tons of C sources that rely on some reasonable standard settings. Apparently M$ has no interest in C any more, let alone backward compatibility, so this might be an excellent market niche for Pelle. "What, your code is more than three years old? Forget Microsoft, try Pelle's C!" - add a bit of support, and you can earn a living...

[CommonTater]

I would like to expose some of my personal opinions in the hope they will be taken into consideration.
...
Finally if you like PellesC suite you must take it as is..... 

Excellent post Frankie and very well said.

What I'm hoping we can do is ADD to what Pelle offers to give a more complete suite of headers, libs and 3rd party libraries.  None of this implies making changes to Pelles C or POASM... only adding our own stuff in support of what's already there.

What better test is there than to see it in popular use?
 

 

[CommonTater]

Pelle's C succeeded in several cases where VS failed. Now the point is that there must be tons and tons of C sources that rely on some reasonable standard settings.

Of course there are... and they're not all 5 or 10 years old... New stuff is being written every day.

Many universities have reinstated C courses... because they're finding that OOP languages in general are a lousy way to learn programming principles.  Many corporate IT departments use C for "quicky" projects, such as re-dating a data base or making backups.  Plus I'd bet real money that someplace in the bowels of Microsoft there is a team working in pure C on some of the stuff that gets awkward in C++ (etc). 

Just because MS is moving to C++ does not mean that C is dead... it means only that MS is moving to C++.

[defrancis7]

Just a quick question:  Does a C/C++ compiler compile an all C source program the same way that a  C only compiler does?  If I remember correctly, are there not a handful of C functions that behave differently under C++?  So, (asking it another way), when a C++ compiler finds one of the functions, does it compile the code as it would under C++ or C?

[Bitbeisser]

Just a quick question:  Does a C/C++ compiler compile an all C source program the same way that a  C only compiler does?  If I remember correctly, are there not a handful of C functions that behave differently under C++?  So, (asking it another way), when a C++ compiler finds one of the functions, does it compile the code as it would under C++ or C?

That might highly depend on the compiler you might be using...

In my experience, all those C++ compilers will compile proper C code, most differences between C and C++ in that case are that C++ is a bit more strict than C (which is most remedied in later ANSI standards,C99/C11).
For example it doesn't allow for arbitrary pointer conversions, you have to explicitly cast pointers, which IMHO rather improves the (maintainability of the) C code.

A common problem that I however see is that when using a C++ compiler, specially for someone not experienced with either C or C++, will inadvertently use C++ specific code that will never work in a plain C compiler...

Ralf