If I am to go to hell, I know already what it will look like: no Linux, no Mac OS X or any other Unix. Just Windows and (maybe) OS/2. And I’m still a programmer. And a system administrator at the same time.
It so happens that my current job requires me to work under Windows, to develop software, well, for Windows. For a series of reason that I don’t want to start explaining here, I decided to go with Borland, sorry, CodeGear C++ Builder as IDE rather than Microsoft’s or Qt. The main problem is that the software ha to be redistributed as proprietary, and cannot relay on stuff like .NET framework (otherwise I could have easily completed it already using Visual C# Express).
I have to admit I find myself way more comfortable with Borland, sorry, CodeGear rather than Microsoft’s sorta-C++ environment, mostly because I learnt real programming with BCB 3 (I had a “personal” license that was given for free with an old magazine years ago). I don’t really like much of the orientation that CodeGear has, but at least I can work with it without going crazy, which is decent anyway.
What is the problem? Well I didn’t have a Windows installation for about five years before, and my last license of Windows was Windows 95; I had to buy a Windows XP license (and it still costs €400 even though it has been released more than five years ago by now), and a license of CodeGear C++ Builder (electronic copy costs €100 less, but it still costs almost one grand). Then I had to get used again to working with VCL.
Not a big deal, mind you, but it reminds me why I so much like Qt, GCC and Emacs. Sure I could use these three on Windows, but not for what I need to do :/
On the other hand, I was able to use a piece of free software to save some of my time: rather than using the XML Writer interface as exported by MS XML services, I built libxml2 (which strangely enough supports Borland compiler natively) and used that, it features a very similar interface, but way nicer. The XPath interface is a bit messy (I was unable to find a way to execute recursive XPaths, that is, after finding a node through XPath, I couldn’t find how to run a second XPath on that, so i had to complete the task with sequential access; if anybody knows how to do that I’d be glad to know). I sincerely find libxml2 could use some better API documentation, if I have more time I’ll gladly see to write it.
But it’s not even done here. I decided that running the virtual machine on a virtual disk on the laptop was being too slow, so I decided to use BootCamp to install on the real disk and use that through Parallels. Reinstalling everything is a pain especially when Windows seem to require ten runs of Windows Update to get the updates right. And users complain about having to use --resume --skipfirst with Gentoo from time to time 😉
Right now I am storing my work data on a virtual hard drive still, as I couldn’t give enough space on the real disk for Windows, and of course Windows does not support the GPT partition scheme I use on the external Firewire drive. It’s frustrating that I can share that disk just fine with Linux and OSX but I’d need another hard drive to get it to share data with Windows. I suppose I should write that off for the future.
Using Parallels shared folder feature, by the way, seems to be quite impossible with development environments: .NET based stuff won’t run the applications with full privileges because they are seen as coming through the network; CodeGear RAD Studio tries to validate the hostname (.PSF) and as it is invalid it fails to open any file that resides on it (unless you map it to a network drive), the Borland Incremental Linker (ilink32) fails because Parallels uses case-sensitive lookup for files, while ilink32 looks for all-caps filenames (MainUnit.cpp becomes MainUnit.obj, but the linker looks for MAINUNIT.OBJ).
I should probably put the subversion repository for my work on Enterprise, but I don’t wan to access it through SSH as it would mean adding a private key able to access Enterprise to Windows…
I sincerely hope my next jobs will stay under Linux for a while, after these two are done 🙂
I thought you were considering upgrading your PC. With a crucial part of a PC (such as memory or a CPU) you can buy the OEM-licence of XP, which is probably 100 euro or less.ps) I do share your pain. I use a DAQ-board from innovative-dsp build around a TI 6713 DSP. Unfortunately the board is only supported under windows with the proprietary TI compiler. And working with that compiler is orders of magnitude worse then the Borland environment to put it mildly.
OEM version wouldn’t work on a virtual machine iirc though :/ that is a problem.And I wish I could be doing something cool as working with a DSP there 😉
Parallels has fixed issue with case-sensitive file systems. Not it works fine for me.