Summary of C Compilers from INFOWORLD

[Stephen B Coy]

In article <28483 at uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> jdb at reef.cis.ufl.edu (Brian K. W. Hook) writes:
>You can't go wrong with MSC 6.0a, the de facto industry standard.  It's one
>of two packages here that supports DOS, Windows, and OS/2.
>
>Programmer's Workbench is an excellent development environment, and
>CodeView takes the pain out of Debugging.  Overall, Microsoft C is the best
>choice for someone who needs only a straight C compiler.

Assuming, of course, that you have at least a fast 386 to run all
this on.  And you don't mind a buggy compiler.

>At only 250 dollars, Lattice C 6.05 is priced right.  It supports DOS and
>OS/2 applicatioms development and includes an excellent set of application
>libraries.  Without the benefit of an update for almost a year, Lattice C
>is struggling to keep up with the times.  Nevertheless, for someone looking
>for an inexpensive, quality C compiler, Lattice would be a good choice.

Lattice has some serious downfalls that in my mind make it
unacceptable.  a) The price really isn't that great especially
compared to Turbo C++.  b) The compile speed is noticably slower
than Microsoft which is in turn slower than Borland.  c) The
executable speed is about 5% slower than MSC 5.1.  d)  The reason
there hasn't been an update in the past year is because SAS (who
bought Lattice) has decided that they don't have the resources to
compete with Microsoft and so will not be putting out new versions
of the compiler.  It's a dead-end product.  e)  While they do
continue to provide support for the compiler they have recently
switched over to a pay-for-support scheme.  f)  The scheme for
selecting which memory model library you link to is real ugly.  All
the libraries have the same name but are in different
subdirectories.  You have to change the LIB environment variable to
reflect whatever memory model you currently want.  The is fixed in
their 286 developer's kit which in addition to coming with a
dos-extender (yeah) also comes with a dongle (hiss).  g) The manuals
are a pain to deal with.  While they may be complete, everytime I
look for something in the index it's not where I expect it to be and
the page numbering scheme assumes that you know which sections are
in which of the 4 3-ring binders the docs come in.

Stephen Coy
coy at ssc-vax.UUCP

BTW  I own Lattice C 6.0, Lattice C 286 Dev Kit, Borland C++ and
soon the Intel 386/486 C Code Builder's Kit.  I also regularly work
with MSC 5.1 and 6.0 and Watcom C 386 8.0.  The comment about
executable speed was based on running my ray tracer, a fairly
floating point intensive task.  I guess my attitude about Lattice
can be summed up by saying that I'd love to sell my copy of 6.0 but
I'd feel guilty sticking anybody with this package at any price.