Clipper - Recommended Clipper compiler for Linux (SuSE)

Author

Recommended Clipper compiler for Linux (SuSE)

Halim A. Issa

2004-08-23, 8:55 pm

Anyone have some good advice for us when evaluating FlagShip over CLIP as
clipper compiler for Linux?
Any other products I should look at?

Thank you.

Przemyslaw Czerpak

2004-08-24, 8:55 am

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 09:19:10 GMT,
Halim A. Issa <halim@hiawata.com> wrote:
> Anyone have some good advice for us when evaluating FlagShip over CLIP as
> clipper compiler for Linux?
> Any other products I should look at?

See also Harbour and xHarbour.

FlagShip is real cross compiler - it changes .prg code into
C code. Very stable and quite fast. Now there is new version
VisualFlagShip (VFS) which allows you to create the same code
for GUI and CUI apps - there is also Win32 port of VFS (GUI only).
It has very interesting OOP model with optional early bindings
which gives very fast code. But the late bindings and evaluation
of macro expressions compiled at runtime is slow - very slow.
(I'm talking about pure FS - I used VFS only as a beta tester
and I cannot say about the results which may be differ then in
final product). The compatibility is quite good but rather
S'87 oriented then CL-5. There are some bugs and you should be
careful with cross referenced arrays. Also some expression are
evaluated in differ order, for example:
x := f1() * f2()
FS first execute f2() than f1() - if f2() has some side effects
on f1() then the result may be wrong.
Anyhow is very good product - I had been using it for years.

CLIP is very interesting project. It creates pcode for VM from
..prg files with some extension for cross compilation to C.
Probably it contains the most number of libraries. A lot of different
RDDs with very nice features like compatible with SIX3 RushMore filters.
Really good MT model - IMHO the best one and big number of libs. The speed
of compiled code is comparable to FS (the string sharing in ITEMs is
still not implemented what causes noticeable slowness in some operations)
but RDDs are much faster also the evaluation of RT compiled code.
The OOP model is a little bit differ - you should see it. CLIP
extensively uses CRC32 hashes for dynamic symbol access so the
speed in late binding is very good - in last year I had less time
for this project but I'm still using it and IMHO it's _VERY_GOOD_

Harbour and xHarbour are very similar (xHarbour is a fork of Harbour).
They generate pcode and VM internals are quite similar to Clipper and
they give the best Clipper compatibility from all of the above.
Also the speed is excellent. In my test xHarbour is about twice faster
then FS and CLIP. The portability is one of the strangeness point.
I was building xHarbour for DOS, W32, x86@32 Linux, x86@64 Linux,
x86 FreeBSD, MAC-OSX, IBMS390 (With Linux in one of VM).
It should be no problem to make any other ports. Just simply try it :-)

best regards,
Przemek

Ole Kalyana Kjaer

2004-08-24, 8:55 am

Halim A. Issa wrote:

> Anyone have some good advice for us when evaluating FlagShip over CLIP as
> clipper compiler for Linux?
> Any other products I should look at?
>
> Thank you.

I have been using FlagShip now for well over 2 years, and I must say that I
am very happy with it. Very stable and very fast compared to Clipper/DOS.
We also use SuSE Linux. A wonderful new world. We have not had Windows in
our company for the past one year or so.
Feels very good that xHarbour and Clip are around, but FlagShip works so
good for me, that I did not have the urge or time to try the others.

Best wishes,
Ole Kalyana Kjaer

Gerard Keating \(Ireland\)

2004-08-24, 3:55 pm

> I have been using FlagShip now for well over 2 years, and I must say that
> I
> am very happy with it. Very stable and very fast compared to Clipper/DOS.

One thing about FlagShip that annoys me is that when it reports and Errors,
it does not always quote the correct line number, it tends (for me at least)
to quote the line number of start of the Function or Control structure the
error happend in.

But it is an excellent product for those that want all the joy of clipper in
a linux environment.

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