What is wrong with using turbo C?

Question

I always find that some people (a majority from India) are using turbo C. I cannot find any reason to use such outdated compiler... But I don\'t know what reasons to give wh

Answer 1

Turbo C is a DOS only product. This means that it no longer runs "natively" on 64-bit versions of Windows, and must be run inside the XP compatibility penalty box.

Answer 2

The most important reason you should use decent C compiler is performance. Since GCC optimizes the code aggressively, the compiled programs would have the performance tens of percents higher than before.

Answer 3

Turbo C generates 16-bit X86 code. Kiiinda nice when you're developing on a 16-bit x86 processor.

Been there. Done that.

The pragmatic reasons for changing are: gcc is under development, with bug-fixes. It deploys on modern operating systems and modern chips natively.

Answer 4

I would say support and standards compliance would be the two big issues for me.

Good luck even finding Borland/Inprise/Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero, or whatever they call themselves nowadays. Even more kudos if you can get them to admit these products exist (although I did at some point get them from the Borland museum on BDN).

Performance can be important but the vast majority of applications I write spend 90% of their time waiting for the user (I don't do genome sequencing, SETI analysis or protein folding - the market is pretty small).

Honestly, if I have the choice between two free products (where obviously money is not an issue), I'll always select the best (that would be GCC for me).

Answer 5

It was also my first compiler (4 yrs ago), though I switched to gcc soon enough when I learned it didn't follow latest standards and relied on features that are considered deprecated or bad practice. These were enough reasons for me to make the switch.

Answer 6

While there are plenty of reasons not to use Turbo C (it's old, predates standards, generates 16-bit code, etc.), it's not valid to answer a question like "How do I do X in Turbo C?" with "Just use GCC". That would be like somebody asking "How do I do X with my 1992 Toyota?" and you saying "Just get a newer car".

People who are using Turbo C are probably doing so because it's a requirement, not because they don't know about anything better. Odds are it's for a programming class where the assignments they turn in have to work in that compiler. When I was grading C++ assignments, it didn't matter what compiler the students used, but they had to compile and run properly with the compiler I was using.