cfh@cca.UUCP (Christopher Herot) (04/27/84)
We are in the process of starting several projects for the IBM-PC, after having lived in the relatively comfortable environment of VAX's running UNIX. It appears that there are at least five different ways on could go about writing software for a project of significant size: 1. Have each programmer use a PC with the 2 floppies. This approach will usually result in almost anyone giving up in frustration. 2. Have each programmer use PC-XT's with their (slow) hard disk. More like the timesharing environment, but hard to share files. 3. Buy PC's and outfit with a faster (e.g. Tallgrass) hard disk. Faster compiles but still no info sharing. 4. Link together the PC's with a disk server such as 3Com's. 5. Use the VAX for compiling and linking, loading the object code (perhaps through LAN) into the PC for execution. Does anyone out there have any interesting observations, especially on approaches 4 and 5? Are there cross-compilers which are as good at optimization as some of the newer PC native mode compilers? As usual, I will summarize responses for the net. -- Christopher F. Herot Computer Corporation of America (decvax,linus)!cca!cfh cfh@CCA-UNIX
gary@mit-eddie.UUCP (Gary Samad) (05/01/84)
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As for your PC development environment:
1) forget the PC with 2 floppies for any significant development.
2,3) the PC with hard disk (and RAM disk) makes compiling tolerable,
but no data sharing and your PC is tied up for the minutes while compiling
4) we are using 3COM file servers and XTs. This works pretty well for
compiling with shared data; but, WATCH OUT: no file locking. MSDOS
assumes that you have complete control of the 'disk' and won't hesitate
to munge blocks on the disk if 2 people try to access the same VOLUME,
if even ONE is writing to it!
5) we also use XTs as terminal emulators, talking to our VAX over a 19.2Kbaud
serial line. We cross C compile and download using MODEM7 protocol to
debug. We will soon be downloading over the Ethernet using Network
Research's Fusion (X.25) protocol. The multiprocessing ability is
indespensable! This is my favorite.
Gary Samad
decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!gary