GeezerVison

User Reviews

• jsrace Edited 2024-01-26

  1 out of 5 stars

  (Sorry about the wall of text. SourceForge has ruined my careful formatting) Summary: For a much better experience, try QB64PE (which works, out-of-the-box), or FreeBASIC (another install-and-go compiler which is just as fast as BCX and also produces small executables). Rant incoming. You have been warned. (Note: this rant was for the current version of BCX Basic, but it also applies to the version presented here on SourceForge.) I wanted to like BCX, really I did. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get this compiler to work. '10 PRINT "Hello, world!"' compiles cleanly on many C compilers - IF you run BCX with the "-x" flag to exclude Win32 headers (excuse me, but WHICH operating system is BCX running on?) - but simply enclosing that PRINT in a FOR...NEXT loop breaks the C compilation stage. From the tiny hints I've been able to scrape together, some BCX features work only on one compiler or another and the poor user must figure out which compiler will work! This tells me that BCX is poorly written and managed. If they can not make BCX work with all C compilers then they should target just one small, fast compiler e.g TInyC or Digital Mars and include a link to that with BCX. I want my wasted time back. The BCX website front page gives a long list of compilers that BCX-produced C code has been compiled with... presumably after a lot of editing, because BCX C code will NOT immediately compile under most of those compilers. Maybe they are referring to code produced by older versions of BCX which are no longer available? They don't say. They also don't say WHICH compiler will actually work with BCX, although many BCX users seem to be fond of Pelles... which ALSO does not work cleanly for me. Sure I could ask for advice on the forum, but why?!? If no C compiler is provided then compatibility information should be on BCX's front page. The BCX homepage even states that BCX is a good compiler for new C programmers. Yup, you'll become a C debugging expert in no time. It took a lot of experimentation to get even a trivial "hello, world" program to compile cleanly. Recent versions of MinGW GCC work for that, as do CLang+LLVM, and Embarcadero's BCC32C, but even these compilers will reject many BCX-translated programs. The BCX homepage boasts about BCX's speed & small size, but those things are moot if BCX must be saddled to a large, lumbering C compiler to get the job done. It took even more work to get a simple Windows GUI program to compile, since I had to figure out which Windows DLLs to link to. Setting up BCX is a difficult, frustrating affair which is not in the spirit of BASIC. BCX is hyped up in a way that implies it will simply work, period, with numerous C compilers. That is NOT the case. The whole reason I'm exploring Basic compilers is that I wanted a compiler for creating quick-and-dirty stand-alone executables, without all of the micro-managing required by C. If/when you get BCX set up, it's more like using a C compiler where you have to tell the linker exactly what to do.... except that BCX is MUCH more frustrating than any C compiler I've ever used. In the BCX forums, some BCX dev or another mentioned using batch files to compile using VERY specific command lines for his C compiler, and having made configuration changes to said C compiler. If you need to make compiler changes and sleuth out the proper compiler invocation to make BCX work then BCX is incomplete. Stop pushing it as the greatest thing since sliced pizza! BCX is no more than a hobby compiler for the BCX devs. It is not fit for real-world use.