Borland goes multi-platform with revamped C++ toolkits

Borland, after two years of coding, has lifted the lid on its latest C++ development toolkits. It says the offerings represent the industry's first multi-platform and multi-compiler development environments to ship for the language.

C++BuilderX integrated development environment (IDE) and Enterprise Studio for C++ aim to deal with common technology "pain points" facing today's C and C++ software engineers - a group which analyst research firm IDC reckons will remain the largest class of developers through to 2005.

These mega trends, according to Borland, include the demand for multi-platform support as applications continue to migrate from UNIX to Linux and the growing need for ANSI/ISO compliance for C++ compilers to overcome nagging incompatibility problems between existing C++ environments. Additionally the firm said it offerings go some way to addressing the need to manage different compilers and debuggers on multiple platforms.

The company added that the revamped development toolkits have been designed to address what industry experts widely predict will be the rapid growth of mobile and embedded device-computing using C++ environments.

"When application run-time performance, code size and low-level access to machine functions and resources, is critical, C++ is often the language of choice for building the types of applications frequently found in the defense, aerospace, finance, manufacturing, and scientific and engineering industries," said Rikki Kirzner, research director at IDC.

He also pointed out that Borland's offering, due to ship commercially later this month, is targeted at the "many C++ developers" currently using non-integrated development toolkits which lead to disparities in compiler and platform support.

According to Borland, C++BuilderX can ease these headaches because the platform development framework allows developers to build and deliver cross-platform applications that do not require compiler extensions. Additionally, as well as compatability with Borland C++ compilers it also supports other popular standards-based C++ compilers including those offered by GCC, Intel, Metrowerks, Microsoft Visual C++ and Sun Forte C++. ®