zadco@ssc-vax.UUCP (Rick Fairfield) (05/06/85)
May 6, 1985
I received many replies to my request for a better CP/M
C compiler than Whitesmiths. Everyone agrees that Whi-
tesmiths C Compiler is a dog. How can they get away with
selling such trash at such a high price (about $700.00) - is
the market asleep?. Anyway, here is a summary of what I
learned:
1) The nearly unanimous favorite was the Aztec 'C' com-
piler from Manx Software. This compiler costs about $200.00.
The Aztec C compiler was liked because of its similarity to
the 4.2 bsd Unix C compiler, because it includes source code
for the library, and because of it has pretty good compila-
tion speed. However, a common complaint was that the code
generated is not very efficient, making for rather long pro-
gram files. Since I am writing large programs this may be a
problem for me.
2) There are a number of inexpensive C compilers (under
$100.00), all of which appear to produce efficient code and
sport fast compilation times. These compilers suffered from
varying degrees of "non-standardness". The BDS C compiler
was the most well liked in this class.
3) Several people mentioned the Eco-Soft C compiler as
being the most modern, standard, and complete CP/M implemen-
tation. However, none of these people had actually used the
compiler; all were reporting second hand information. If
anyone has any hands-on experience with this compiler I'd
like to hear from you.
Thanx,
zzzzzadco
aka Rick Fairfield
Boeing Aerospace Co
206-773-1004