Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
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Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
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Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#2If you want to play Quake for free on Windows 11, try this: https://quake-remake.en.uptodown.com/windows/download
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#3"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time."
And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old.
I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you made a list of Microsoft bangers it's in the top 5 with probably windbg, quickbasic and windows 3.11.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#4VC++ 6 was awesome, I wouldn't have a career if I didn't have pirated copies of VC++ 6 and Borland Delphi. And look at how clean and crisp it all looks. Every pixel has a purpose.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#5If you want to play Quake for free on Windows 11, try this: https://quake-remake.en.uptodown.com/windows/download
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Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#6"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…
Before the .Net era, there were millions of programmers who were experts in VB. In fact, VB6 was the defacto tool to build desktop apps.
Then Microsoft decided to compete with the new-age rivals: Java and CORBA. So it expanded COM into DCOM and then further into COM+, and eventually released the .Net platform.
Suddenly, those millions of programmers and their built desktop apps were obsolete, as they had to race to understand .Net and learn how to use it to build new apps and replacements for the old VB6 apps.
And somewhere along the way, many of them decided it wasn't worth the struggle (because .Net was a nightmare to install as client apps on Windows machines; even the deployment scripts had becom3 too complex), and they migrated to other tools (Java, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.) or to non-programming jobs (usually management).
Thus, within a few years, Microsoft had veritably killed the programming industry it took decades to build and nurture (and yes, Microsoft's decision to turn a blind eye - as its Windows OSes, MS Office and Visual Studio (VB & VC++) tools were pirated across the world, churning out millions of programmers and users familiar with its products as they used the pirated versions at school, college. home and office - that was also a deliberate decision by Microsoft during this halycon era).
But I feel .Net became too big of a beast even for mighty Microsoft to handle. As concerns grew over the performance aspects and innumerable dependencies of the .Net platform and related tools (Azure, SSIS, SSRS, etc.), the world started to shift away from Microsoft's tools, and that's perhaps why Microsoft finally knuckled under and embraced the open-source ecosystem it had openly hated for decades. VSCode, etc., are Microsoft's last-ditch attempts to have some relevancy in the programming industry.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#7"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…
You make it sound like he's some young'un, but Fabien has been programming since 1983.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#8"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…
Before the .Net era, there were millions of programmers who were experts in VB. In fact, VB6 was the defacto tool to build desktop apps. Then Microsoft decided to compete with the new-age rivals: Java and CORBA. So it expanded COM into DCOM and then further into COM+, and eventually released the .Net platform. Suddenly, those millions of programmers and their built desktop apps were obsolete, as they had to race to u…
.net was fine ... they were solving these fleeting problems of interoperability, event driven gui programming, object re-use and a bunch of other things. They tried tackling this so many ways: win16, ole, mfc, activex, win32s ... it was a big mess and nothing really worked well.
Microsoft had some really smart people working on the problem for years and .net was the culmination of the efforts with things like c# and the very interesting f#.
The problem was they finally solved the desktop interoperability problem when it no longer mattered and there wasn't a huge killer app for it.
Properly scoped well designed abstractions can be extremely powerful and also pretty useless.
There's an interesting counterfactual if they had .net ready to go around windows 98 ... I might be on a windows phone right now...
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#9"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…
Turbo Pascal had breakpoints, variable inspections in the late 80s. I think it had stack traces too but not 100% sure.
I am not old enough to have used it professionally, but my teacher used it for teaching intro programming in the early 2000s. So I used it quite a lot, the debugger was great and the development loop was so tight. Not until I got into web dev did it ever feel "fast" to make change->see change. To this day it is still bad in most stacks.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#10"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…
Ah yes, VC++6.0
It had such a long lifetime.
The last time I used it in anger to release commercial software was round about the year 2020, at which point the dev environment for that particular piece of software that customers were still paying annual license fees on was a VM machine. The source code repo it linked to had been unknowingly destroyed years earlier, so the VM image was copied around as needed. One had to find the very latest version of that image, because otherwise any changes one made would of course exclude some other recent changes and customers would receive a Frankenversion.
Starting the VM would reveal a desktop with VC++6 already open, and enough supporting evidence to show how to build the software. Make your changes, build, carefully extract the binary to send to the users, freeze the VM again.
I expect it's still there, still being brought back every year for "one last update."