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The majority of the professional world runs on Windows. There are many advantages: (1) Stable platform that's backward compatible over long periods of time. (
by api 8y ago
The majority of the professional world runs on Windows. There are many advantages:
(1) Stable platform that's backward compatible over long periods of time.
(2) Very good rapid application development tooling, e.g. Visual Studio which is probably still the best IDE overall.
(3) A huge trained developer base making it easy to recruit. Same goes for IT personnel.
(4) A huge pool of software, custom dev firms, etc.
(5) Certification for US DOD and other certification-heavy environments where Windows is used heavily, which may be important for an aerospace company.
(6) Integration with everything in the business and government world is already done.
(7) Windows has a lot of complex user, permission, and policy management stuff. Active Directory is The Standard for UAM in the corporate world.
The cost of Microsoft licensing is chicken feed compared to the cost of building and launching rockets.
Overall I don't think it's a bad decision. Not everything is an Internet startup or hacker project. Right tools for the job.
- user5994461 8y agoIf it's more than 10 years ago, Visual Studio was the only IDE for C++ and the C++ was the most common language.
- jaimex2 8y agoWhy do you think that is? I've always wondered why there's such a small list of decent IDEs for C anything. I usually just stick to vim and a handful of plugins.
- user5994461 8y agoThere are no good development tools for C++ because it's an impossibly hard language to parse and process. For instance, try writing an auto completion tool for C++ and Java. The first one take orders of magnitude more work for a mediocre result. Using vim is symptom of the problem. The available tooling is so bad or non existent that it's comparable to a text editor.
- josefx 8y agoFor a long time the tools were either proprietary or GNU. Sadly gcc worked well enough that its policy of not exposing anything that could be abused by proprietary software meant that any tooling that surfaced had to work around the free compiler. Remember the day emacs got full featured refactoring support based on GCC? Stallman singlehandedly killed that for exposing too much. Good C++ tooling only started to turn up when Apple made its move from gcc to llvm/clang and we actually got competition in the free compiler space and a compiler based framework to build tools on top.
- konschubert 8y agoDidn't netbeans exist?
- neop1x 8y agoI don't agree with most of it (except that VisualStudio is a really good product). Windows is a consumer platform for playing games and having fun at home. It is also very expensive in corporate/server space. I have seen backwards compatibility broken many times (drivers no longer supported), it doesn't even support other arch than x86 and it is bloated.