Hmm...

[pphaneuf]

The Eaton Centre was on fire today, so I went there to eat at lunch. Of course, I met iangurudata there, where we discussed toilets and fencing. I had to tell him I was just fine with my sausage. Then I went back to the office, and my compiler told me this:

xplc/uuidgen.cpp:36: error: invalid static_cast from type `unsigned char[16]' to type `unsigned char[16]'

I didn't think it would be so hard.

Comments

[andysoft.livejournal.com]

that's a funny error message, and you don't even work with a microsoft compiler, do ya? :)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Nope, that's gcc 3.3 (but I think that message would be like this all the way back to 2.95).

[wlach.livejournal.com]

Actually, I find the microsoft compiler's error messages to be much more helpful than gcc's (particularly when I'm able to take advantage of Visual Studio's online help).

[andysoft.livejournal.com]

I know, I must admit that my fav dev IDE is VStudio, debugging is such a joy with it, of course it has problems, but in terms of ease of use it rates pretty high. However, I will not admit in public that I like anything from Microsoft, so this message could be a fake :)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Apple's Xcode is pretty damned sweet, I have to say. And my big problem with Microsoft's development environment isn't the compiler or the IDE (which is very sophisticated and helpful), but the APIs themselves, which are so horrid and disgusting that you actually can't really go by without the IDE (where on Linux, you just give me a text editor and a few terminals, and I'm good to go). The Apple APIs are even better than what we have on Linux and they have a very nice IDE.

Pisses me off a bit, because I think Unixes (for server work) and Windows (for large target market) are actually relevant, as opposed to Apple. Why does the nice environment to work in must be the irrelevant one? Gah!

[andysoft.livejournal.com]

I only tried working with Macs once, that was like 12 years ago or something, back then it was like win3.1, no preemptive tasking and I fled, never wanted to touch a mac again, so I have no clue about anything regarding macs.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Mac OS 9 and less were insane that way! But Mac OS X is quite nice, being actually a rebranded NeXTstep, an operating system written by the company Steve Jobs started out of spite when he was booted from Apple. It's based on a Mach microkernel with a BSD Unix environment, but the display isn't based on X like on other Unix, it's its own stuff that's way better. Doom was written on that. :-)

As I like to say, Apple's new and innovative OS was an OS from 15 years ago, but it's okay, as it was 20 years in advance on it's time. ;-)

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Depressingly, Watcom's were even better than Microsoft's, so you can imagine how much fun it was to go from that ("It looks like you forgot a semicolon at the end of this line here") straight to gcc ("Parse error on line irrelevant").

I only wish I were exaggerating those exact error messages.

[dcoombs.livejournal.com]

Yep, I used the Watcom compiler for two work terms there, and it was pretty freaking awesome, I have to say.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

That's true. They're also better formatted, especially when it comes to template names. In the error message I quoted above, GCC 2.95 had an odd wording that wasn't too clear, but the type dumper was a bit clearer in exposing that there was some array-to-pointer decaying (it said I was trying to convert an 'unsigned char *' to an 'unsigned char[16]', which is indeed forbidden by the standard).