MP| TCXL?  You wanna hear about TCXL?  Naah, you don't wanna hear about TCXL.
  | Well, okay, if you insist...

Heheheh...I know what you mean.

MP| I participated in IDC's Pre-Release Beta program for their new Multi-Plat
  | Developer's Workshop (which includes virtually all IDC programming librar
  | including TCXL for DOS, protected mode DOS, Windows, and OS/2), and thoug
  | was an interesting experience, it was anything but enjoyable.  Bug report
  | would simply be ignored -- unless it concerned their new TUI user interfa
  | of course.

I have had better results, but IDC has a history (with me, anyway) of
being very slow to react.  I've been nagging them to update for Watcom
v10, and they will wait for the next release (probably another six months,
if their pattern holds).  I've been on them for *years* about their code
size...

MP| Windowing was slow as molasses in January... and this was in the
  | DOS library (the 386 and OS/2 libraries were unbearable)!

I've never had problems with their windowing library...I've found it to be
quite fast myself.  However, it is *extremely* bloated, which is my
biggest gripe regarding TCXL.  The small model is a joke, since their code
contains almost 55K of overhead.  I use 5.52 for some of my DOS stuff (30K
of overhead), and have been using 6.12 for some other DOS programs.  On a
memory-sensitive application, I went as far as to write my own windowing
code (it's about 5K), but I doubt if I could port it to OS/2...

One of the big reasons I went for TCXL is TSPAWN and TREDIR, which are
swapping and stdout redirection functions.  But their other code is
prohibitive in size.  Fortunately, I've been able to "disconnect" them
from TCXL and link them into my applications with my own windowing code,
and it's worked very well, so far...

MP| In short, I wouldn't recommend TCXL, in its current form, to my worst
  | enemy (not even to Bill Gates, which should tell you something!).

Heheheh...OK, hot-seat time.   What would you suggest as a good cross
platform product with similar capabilities to TCXL (e.g. windowing, data
entry, help, etc.)?  I have no real attachments to TCXL, other than coding
time and money, but if there's something out there that's far better, I'd
seriously consider the change.  My biggest concern is cross-platform for
DOS, OS/2 and (maybe) Windows ...
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