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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

#11

Post by haspok »

DanielHB wrote: post #9
kristopolous wrote: post #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 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 thi…

Yes, but if you compare the complexity of (Turbo) Pascal to the complexity of C++... language, environment, libraries and cross-compilation...

(A nice thought-experiment is to ask if Quake could have been coded in TP at all - even if memory hadn't been an issue (I think there was no DOS extender for TP, but I could be wrong).)

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#12

Post by icelusxl »

DanielHB wrote: post #9
kristopolous wrote: post #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 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 thi…

Yes, Turbo Pascal 5.0 introduced those features in 1988.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNx4dxXptUg

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#13

Post by kristopolous »

DanielHB wrote: post #9
kristopolous wrote: post #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 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 thi…

That wasn't the banger for vs6 it was the workflow and muscle memory of the thing. The flow is still unmatched IMHO. It was like avid or photoshop for writing windows software.

Default keys in modern IDEs are basically still the vs assignments from the 5/6 era.

It was the closest Microsoft ever came to making their own emacs or vim. vs6 was like 90% of my screen time as a windows dev in the 90s and 2000s

I've been a linux user for 30 years ... I never had the vs6 level of efficiency in linux, still don't. NetBeans was the closest ... yes, NetBeans... (I've given up though, I do things in nvim, tmux and suffer)

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#14

Post by haspok »

kristopolous wrote: post #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 mad…

I used VS6 professionally and for private business around 2000-2004, and it was still going strong then. VC++ was great.

One thing though that I still have nightmares about is Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's idea of a source control system for small teams. It was not only terrible to use (and slow), but we regularly lost data in it due to concurrency issues.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#15

Post by Traubenfuchs »

haspok wrote: post #14
kristopolous wrote: post #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 mad…

I used VS6 professionally and for private business around 2000-2004, and it was still going strong then. VC++ was great. One thing though that I still have nightmares about is Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's idea of a source control system for small teams. It was not only terrible to use (and slow), but we regularly lost data in it due to concurrency issues.

It was my favorite VCS ever at my first workplace where we deployed .war to prod tomcat from eclipse with one click. No tests, no PRs, no tickets. Customer would call me and I could get a change out to them within 5 minutes. Most (and only!) agile workplace I ever experienced in two decades.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#16

Post by kristopolous »

haspok wrote: post #14
kristopolous wrote: post #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 mad…

I used VS6 professionally and for private business around 2000-2004, and it was still going strong then. VC++ was great. One thing though that I still have nightmares about is Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's idea of a source control system for small teams. It was not only terrible to use (and slow), but we regularly lost data in it due to concurrency issues.

TortoiseCVS all the way down. Nothing else came close. (this was before git and svn, kids. relax!)

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#18

Post by pragma_x »

kristopolous wrote: post #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 mad…

100% agree. Not only was VC++6 a stand-out product overall, but it was easily the better IDE out of the crop of options at the time.

Sadly, the product line got worse before VSCode came out. Things are much better now.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#19

Post by nnevatie »

haspok wrote: post #14
kristopolous wrote: post #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 mad…

I used VS6 professionally and for private business around 2000-2004, and it was still going strong then. VC++ was great. One thing though that I still have nightmares about is Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's idea of a source control system for small teams. It was not only terrible to use (and slow), but we regularly lost data in it due to concurrency issues.

> Visual SourceSafe

Ugh, instant flashbacks and not the good kind.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#20

Post by jchw »

kristopolous wrote: post #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 mad…

VC++6 was the first IDE I ever used: as a kid, I was gifted a CD that had a version of it included. What a great tool to have for the time.

I would go on to use Bloodshed Dev-C++ next. Which was also quite great for the time.

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