Using Embarcadero Borland

As I'm more and more dissapointed with VS 2010 I'm trying to find some alternative and I was looking at Embarcadero's new edition of C++ env.

Is there any point of learning new (n开发者_如何学Cot popular I think) product when VS practically dominates market?

Thanks.

Although I'm not really a Windows programmer, I have been using Borland/Embarcadero to-and-fro during the past 10 years. Here are my personal opinions of why you should not consider it:

• The general quality of Builder has dropped significantly over the years. Borland Builder 6 was the last high-quality product, from there the IDE itself has become more and more buggy. The IDE typically crashes once per 1-2 weeks of usage.

• No undo in the RAD design. Yes I know, it is quite unbelievable. Even the earliest versions of utter crap like VB had this. But Builder year 2011 doesn't! If you slip on your keyboard and accidentally alter a component, you shall be punished!

• The debugger is next to useless. This might have been fixed in the latest version, but in several versions you can't single step through the program without collapsing struct/class variables in the watch window, which is of course very frustrating.

• Documentation is very poor, often non-existant, and may be written in Object Pascal, even though you ordered the C++ IDE. The help files also have a tendency to linger as evil ghost processes in your computer, making it impossible to shut down Windows before the ghost is busted.

Personally I'm considering switching to Visual Studio.

I've been using both the Embarcadero Borland, now RAD Studio 2010, c++ and VS2008 every day for the last 6 months. My programming philosophy has always been to use the right tool for the project, no matter what that particular tool is. So a couple of my observations/opinions are -

Advantages

1. The WYSIWYG screen designer is good. It acts a lot like the WinForms editor in VS2008, but for c++. In VS2008, the only package for c++ that I've used that is close is Qt. My biggest compliant is documentation, but that applies to most software, so it isn't just their problem.
2. For many builtin classes, they are built on TObject class. This base class functions a lot like Object in C#. The biggest advantage this gives you as a c++ programmer, if you follow a few rules, is mostly automatic memory management. It's not garbage collection, rather, list of related objects that are deleted together.

Disadvantages-

1. The RAD Studio 2010 C++ environment exists primarily to support Delphi. That is their real strength anyway. Nowhere does anything say this. It is just an overall feel that I've gotten from using system.
2. Limited support for 3rd party libraries.
   3. It cannot link with any Microsoft compatible c++ library. This includes both Microsoft and 3rd party libraries. They use a different "name mangling" format from Microsoft. So everything has to wrapped in a c language wrapper.
   4. We use the Boost Libraries a lot in VS2008. But in Rad Studio, it only has limited support for Boost.
3. I've found the overall speed of the generated code to significantly slower than that produced by VS2008.

Please remember, that these are just one person's opinions.

I would suggest that you download a demo version of the product and try it for yourself.

If you want to be 100% up-to-date, you have to use the development environment provided by the platform's vendor.

If you do not mind waiting few months/years for new things to get ported over (or your market allows for it) then you surely you can venture into the unknown.

It's not that Borland's IDEs (unlike MS' VS family) needed any advanced training to start using them and be already productive. That is the main reason why they remain popular in many niches.