Posts Tagged: mingw

Technical — No Comments
7
Oct 08

Tech Tatva ‘08

I dont have any intentions to write down long long novel resembling stories. Tech Tatva ‘08, the annual tech fest of Manipal Institute of Technology is commencing tomorrow. This four day long fest will showcase the best technical event and talents in the college. This time some categories have taken an inititatve to organize the event in a revised way, just waiting to see the outcome.

Lets start with Param, the category in which am involved. There are four events under this category - CodeBytes, Puzzle Mania, MobiVision 1.0 and Jour.

CodeBytes is the classical coding championship which has the highest turnout amongst all the events under Param. It is to be held tomorrow, 8th Oct. This time this event has been changed quite a lot. The first round is the prelims which contains less than even 20 questions and more than an hour given to solve. Debugging and writing the output of code snippet has been given more importance. Only those who have good understanding of C/C++ are bound to clear this stage. The lab round is not that puzzle round as it used to be. The questions will be quite simple,  the efficiency of the program will be taken into consideration. We would give them simple questions, the marking is to be done on the total execution time of the program. The POSIX time command will be used to calculate the total execution time. People are required to code in Dev C++ with MinGW as compiler. This portable code will then be transferred to Linux systems, compiled using g++ and then using time command, tested for total time use.

Note: Turbo C++ is not allowed. We highly discourage this old and crappy compiler.

MobiVision is another event which is unique of its type, we focussed much on PyS60 and Android, though other mobile platforms are also welcome. We have recieved satisfactory number of abstracts. This event is on 10th October during the afternoon. The shortlisted students are asked to give a presentation of the app which they made, just a working protoype is required. Based on the ideas and implementation, the teams would be ranked.

The last event is Jour. If people can remember, last year it used to be called Night Out when some coding champs would loose their sleep for finding a solution to a puzzle. It’s all gone! Now you have more than 18 hours, make a fully working software application in the stipulated time. The final shortlisted students are required to give a presentation of the application they made to the judges and audiences. The questions will be put up on the site, keep a watch.

Technical — 9 Comments
4
Jul 08

Turbo C++ ! Please bury it….

Even though we advance to new technologies and say ourselves as technically superior when compared to guys 10 years back, its a sad truth that we need to actually look at out back for the truth. You might be wondering why? Read on…

Engineering colleges are the places where most of the present day engineers have their first programming experience. Naturally we expect them to use those technologies which are provided by the colleges (after all we cant expect everyone to be a geek). If these college admins dont take the initiative to provide latest technologies to the students, what can we expect? Either a student will adapt themselves after finding that they lag or may change themselves after joining a job.

The aim of this post is to tell directly how much Turbo C++ sucks. This crappy compiler introduced long long long back should go or should be banned by LAW! It is one of the main reasons why computer engineers of our college don’t know what actually are coding standards. What the hell is conio.h, clrscr() and getch()? These are not a part of ANSI C recommendations. Using them will make your code unusable on other compilers.

I really  have a bad experience dealing with this sucking 16 bit compiler. It eats up so much of processing power as if its almighty and born just to rule over the CPU! Just try minimizing its IDE and opening any other application. You may not be able to open even MS PAINT (at least not for me). The resource utlization is mainly due to the IDE which is named tc.exe . The real compiler is tcc.exe . If you ever want to use this compiler, just invoke tcc.exe via command line. Don’t use the IDE. Ever try to run it in non-full screen mode and see its charm ;)
Just as a workaround, it would be my job to provide you the alternatives. The best is to use Dev C++ provided by Bloodshed. Howsoever bad it may be (for its critics), its thousands times more efficient than the legacy compiler. Dev C++ is more frequently used a graphical compiler (means with IDE). If you still in love with gcc style compilation using command line, I suggest you to use MinGW. Its a GNU port for windows and has same feel like that of original one. It even has an IDE named Visual-MinGW.

Hope you people would now have nice experience when it comes to programming and building enterprise level softwares on Windows.