LE>What are peoples' opinions on Watcom C++ 10.5 for developing OS/2 apps ? I'v
LE>been offered a cheap copy of it, and may dump all my Borland stuff and use
LE>Watcom for everything instead.

Well I'd certainly favour it over Borland's BCOS2 product.  By
comparison, Watcom will offer you much better code generation (more
reliable and significantly faster).

The Borland IDE environment is quite good and Watcom's may feel a little
clunky by comparison -- especially if you're using IBM's EPM editor
which won't (as standard) offer you syntax-based highlighting and a few
other "fancy" features that are convenient.  There's nothing to stop you
using the MS-Windows IDE under Win-OS/2 if you must have these features
of course.

You won't get an appliations user-interface class library such as OWL or
IBM's UICL but there are plenty of 3rd-party options in that area if
you're not happy writing at an API level.

Watcom comes with an assembler (WASM) but it's not as good as TASM --
don't worry, you can use your existing TASM with Watcom if you want but
thanks to the *excellent* optimiser in Watcom's compiler there's seldom
any real benefit to using assembler anyway.

Watcom has the usual range of utilities including:

  * 2 debuggers (PM and text-mode) -- supporting remote debugging
    via network or parallel ports.

  * an execution sampler and profiler

  * librarian

  * Dialog, bitmap, menu, resource editors (from IBM's Toolkit)

But perhaps the main reasons people choose the Watcom compiler over
other options are:

1. It is a true multi-platform, cross compiler supporting numerous
   different PC environments including:  OS/2 1.x, OS/2 2.x OS/2 WARP,
   Win16, 32-bit Win16, Win32, Win32c, Win32s, DOS, 32-bit DOS, Novell
   and QNX (QNX libs not included).

2. It is one of the few currently available compilers which can create
   16-bit OS/2 code.  This includes applications and device-drivers.

3. It is an industrial-strength C/C++ compiler that arguably produces
   the fastest code available on intel 80x86 processors.  This is one of
   the reasons that you see so many PC games compiled with Watcom.

4. It needs far less memory than IBM's CSet++ or VAC.

When I'm asked "what's the best compiler for OS/2?" I generally answer
like this:

If you only intend to write 32-bit OS/2 code and have plenty of memory
and CPU power, go with IBM's CSet++ or VAC.

If you only have 8-16MB of RAM and a 486, need to write 16-bit apps or
device drivers, or also want to be able to create applications for DOS
or Windows then go with Watcom.

There is no *best* compiler.  The "most suitable" one depends entirely
upon the user's own requirements and priorities.

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