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Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

In 1990 I worked for 5 weeks during holidays at Ikea so I could afford that box :)

Lattice C was spread across 4 disks. After 7 minutes of disk swapping, I'd get my linker errors.

Anyway, need to check it out and see if it does run Shadow of the Beast!

DICE-C FTW, no disk swapping needed :) I ordered DICE in the early 90's by sending the money in a letter to the US and got the disk and even a personal reply from Matt Dillon (of DragonFly-BSD fame) back. Great times.

I was an Aztec C user. That was the second compiler I ever purchased (after Abacus C for the C64). Damn... I'm still buying compilers today thanks to Microsoft.

Bit of topic, but out of interest, why do you buy/use/need the Microsoft toolchain?

(I work on open source stuff and I've only ever used GCC and Clang - I'm not asking this as a rhetorical way to say you're stupid, I'm genuinely ignorant of the advantages).

I can't speak for the original poster's use case, but wanted to point out that the Microsoft compilers are free (as in beer) anyway. They do charge an arm and a leg for things like Team Foundation Server or whatever but the fully functional (32 and 64 bit) compilers, linkers, nmake, etc ship with the free Windows SDK. And even most of the useful IDE stuff is available for free in the VS Express editions.

1 - Works pretty much "out of the box". And with the latest APIs Windows just added. (Something that I tried making work on MingW but I got working only with the MS toolchain: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb945061.aspx)

2 - The IDEs are good. Not great, buggy sometimes, but they help you with the more hairy things in Windows.

3 - Even if it's something like C# that would be easy to do with the Free IDEs, it's helpful

So, to sum it up, developer convenience.

Its some of what raverbashing has said. We are doing some lower level Windows stuff with it and share code with other groups. We tried VC Express about 5 or more years ago but found that some stuff did not work properly and haven't revisited. Engineering time wins out over $300-$400 cost / dev every 4 or 5 years.

Lattice C which then became SAS C... the first serious software that I really bought!

Me too! I still remember the grey documentation binders with diskettes enclosed.

Devpac for me!

Damn that was a nice system. Besides cygnus ed, that was some of the best money I ever spent.

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