Development Platform

Development will be done Windows XP Home as that is what my computer runs (for the moment I do not intend to upgrade, to Vista or 7, as XP Home is working just fine). For now I'm not planning to develop for cross platforms (like for example the way FreeBasic runs on several platforms). Besides, whatever criticisms there are about Windows, it does have the largest market share.

I thought about trying out some of the algorithms in Tcl (using the free ActiveTcl package) and even sketched some of out in Tcl, but Tcl is a relatively unknown language, is basically in interpreter itself (though it may somewhat compile code internally – I not familiar with the details) and is not really fast. I also considered using something like FreeBasic, but that would be something new to learn (and most of my BASIC experience is with GW-Basic). I have the most experience with C and C++, though I'm currently rusty on C++ as I haven't been using the last 10 years. I decided on C++ because I think it is a good language and this is a chance to get back into it (and it may be come is use in the near future in my regular job).

There are many C++ compilers I could use, but I decided on the free Borland C++ 5.5 command line tools using the free Vide2. The second choice would be the GNU GCC package with G++ if the Borland C++ proves unsatisfactory, but so far I was not able to get it work on Windows using MinGW and MSYS (I do use GCC for my regular job on Linux). I learned C++ on Borland's C++ package for DOS with DPMI upgrading through 4.5 during the 1990s. And was able to successfully get Borland C++ 5.5 to work with Vide2. I'm not buying a commercial product for this effort since this is right now just a hobby.