NIM language questions

[Danny Mayer]

Jeffrey Altman wrote:
> Kevin Koch wrote:
>> The parts of NIM I've looked at so far are written in C.  Since this is a
>> GUI app, why doesn't it leverage MFC and C++?  Or why not the .NET
>> framework, which provides even richer controls?  I don't want to go back to
>> writing message loops!
>>
> For several reasons.
> 
> (1) MFC over the years has proven to be less than compatible as
> Microsoft issued new versions of Visual Studio.
> 
> (2) C++ has proven to be less than portable across new Visual Studio
> releases due to changes in Microsoft's template libraries and their
> additional and removal of C++ language extensions.   It is also not
> particularly good at permitting DLLs to be built with a different
> compiler than the EXE due to the class library dependencies and export
> list issues. 
> 
> (3) NIM is designed so that it can be portable across operating systems.
> 

I agree with Jeff on this, having written a lot of VC++ code. If you
keep to standard C++ code and don't use the MS templates then you are
usually safe but I've tripped over plenty of surprises over the years.

Danny