This isn't supposed to be a "bash Visual Studio" post but it may come off that way. Visual Studio 2008 with the addition of the "Visual Assist X" plugin make C++ development pretty nice on Windows albeit a bit expensive. $200 for Visual Studio Standard and another $150 for Visual Assist X. My problem is with the speed of compilation. I develop against ParaView (www.paraview.org) which is a largish sized project to compile. Excluding the initial CMake generation of the Visual Studio solution ParaView takes upwards of 45 minutes to compile (in Debug) on my main computer*. Some might say this is reasonable. Take the same source code, boot into OS X and run "make -j16" and I get a compilation that takes about 10 to 15 minutes to compile. Hmm.
If you look around the internet with google you will find that basically it would seem that Visual Studio just is not setup to take advantage of multiple core CPUs which is a shame because I would start tending to do more work in Windows 7 x64 with Visual Studio if it did take advantage. For now Visual Studio is relegated to a second class citizen where by I use it to sanity check my cross platform code and debug when necessary.
* Hardware: 2009 Mac Pro, 2x Quad Core Nehalem Xeon (16 threads) running at 2.66 GHz with 12 GB of ram installed. Windows 7 Pro x64 with Visual Studio 2008 standard edition installed. On the flip side I have OS X 10.5.8 Leopard running the latest version of Xcode tools. (GCC 4.2).
Feel free to show me where I went wrong.
Mike
Friday, December 11, 2009
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