Hi Mike Bilow, Yes it's me again 



17-Feb-97 23:43:15, Mike Bilow wrote to William Geiger

          Subject: "Which C++ Compiler ... ?"



 MB> William Geiger wrote in a message to Jonathan de Boyne Pollard:



 WG>> Well I just talked to Watcom today. They called to let me

 WG>> know that v11 has been released.  I inquired what

 WG>> enhancements had been made to the OS/2 portion of the

 WG>> product. Zip, nada, zero, nothing.



 MB> This is untrue.  The way that Watcom compilers work, there is actually a

 MB> platform independent core logic generator which is identical for all

 MB> supported targets.  For example, v11.0 will provide the same compiler

 MB> improvements on OS/2 as it will on Win32, including MMX code

 MB> generation, P6 optimization, and so forth.  Whether Watcom sales staff

 MB> understands this is another matter.



Yes but these are enhansments to support new hardware not any OS/2 specific

support. Every new release from Watcom contains enhansements to their

Windows support while nothing has been done on the OS/2 side for quite

awhile now. If they were serrious about supporting OS/2 they would have

at least added DSOM support or upgraded the OS/2 toolkit it's still v2.0. I

think that they have made it clear that they have no intrest in the OS/2

community.



When they killed Vx-Rexx they took their developers and moved them to their

Optima++ project. Did they take advantage of their OS/2 background and make

the product cross platform? Nope. And from talking with them they never

will.



 WG>> Watcom used to be an OS/2 friendly vendor but since they were

 WG>> purchased by PowerSoft they have gone to shit. I doubt that we

 WG>> will ever see any more OS/2 support from this company.



 MB> In fairness, OS/2 has not been the moving target that Win32 has become,

 MB> and it doesn't require compiler vendors to chase it around as the API

 MB> gets changed right and left.  IBM has also not made it easy for tools

 MB> vendors, and has even broken their own Visual Age products by such
actions as replacing the SOM

 MB> version in OS/2 as of FixPak 26.  This means that the OS/2 action is in

 MB> the libraries, unlike Windows where it is in the front ends.



The fact that OS/2 is not a moving target is even more reason there should

be better support for the platform. If you don't have to chase every change

to the API's you can concentrate on makeing a better product. I knwo for a

fact that the reason why Secant's class lib's don't support Watcom is due

to the fact that they could get no support from Watcom to get them to work.



 WG>> I was looking into using some of their DB products for some

 WG>> client-server work but considering the direction their company

 WG>> is going I am recomending that my clients go with DB/2.



 MB> Watcom's database products are fairly primitive and have been falling

 MB> further back as times has gone on.  However, this is true of all supported

 MB> platforms.



 WG>> I really hate this. I hate propritary systems. Due to IBM's

 WG>> mismanagement of OS/2 I am being boxed into a corner of having

 WG>> only one vendor providing the tools I need for my work IBM.

 WG>> Maybe Java can revive OS/2 but it still has miles to go before

 WG>> I would consider it anything more than a toy for developing Web

 WG>> applets.



 MB> Platform independent database engines don't exactly seem like the wave of

 MB> the future to me.  It has never really been an OS/2 market, but this is

 MB> primarily because OS/2 is not especially strong at database serving

 MB> by comparison with, say, Unix.  On the other hand, there are people

 MB> who take NT seriously as a database server, and that is inexplicable.



Well OS/2 isn't that bad but it depends on what you are trying to do with

it. I understand that as a Notes Server it works quite well. I Wouldn't try

to run a Airline reservation system on it, no but then again I would want

something a little more powerfull than an Intel PC. :) Unfortunatly Unix

scares off a lot of people from using it as a Midrange server, especially

in a expanding company where all their experiance in Win-Tel/Novell. Older

companies that have been running Unix for years don't have this problem.



I have a NT 4.0 box here and it's a pig. I don't know why anyone would run

MS networking software from my years of experiance they have never been any

good at it. I surely wouldn't use it for an aplication or DB server.



 -=> See Ya!!, William Geiger <=-



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