64 bit

Buddha Buck blaisepascal at gmail.com
Fri Jul 25 10:13:20 EDT 2014


On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 9:05 AM, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:

> Actually, Microsoft's $13,299 price tag is rather excessive (IMHO).
>
> I mean, the whole GNU Toolchain (GCC, binutils, autotools, etc.) is *free*
> and
> is used as a 'serious development package for professional products'.
>  Cygwin
> appears to have a 64-bit incarnation and is a free download (this suggests
> that there should be a 64-bit version of mingw as well, which should allow
> cross-building 64-bit MS-Windows applications on a (64-bit) Linux system).
>

That price tag is excessive (IMHO2). Microsoft has an extremely aggressive
price-tier strategy for their development tools. They have several
different products with different mixes of features, all at different
prices. They also have a subscription-based "developers network" (MSDN),
which gives you access to basically every OS, device driver SDK, every
product MS makes you may have to interact with, etc, on a "license to test
against" basis. The $13K price tag goes with Visual Studio 2013
Ultimate+MSDN, which has every feature you are never going to use for
development, plus a 1-year subscription to MSDN.

On the other hand, the "Professional" version is much, much, less. It cost
less to get my entire development team at work VS2013Pro (without MSDN)
than it would to get one VS2013Ultimate+MSDN license.

But even below that, Microsoft makes the VS Express line, plus their
MSBuild toolchain and SDKs available for free. Our headless build-servers
have no licensing costs.

So the fancy IDE costs $$$$, but the functional equivalent to the GNU
Toolchain is free-as-in-free-beer (as opposed to the GNU Toolchain which is
both free-as-in-free-beer and free-as-in-free-speech).

But I suspect that this discussion has wandered far enough afield that it
would be off-topic on the devel list, much less the user list where it is.


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