The Fate of Dev-C++

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I cut my teeth on C++ back in my early days of coding. I used one of the Borland IDE's at first, but once I discovered Dev-C++ I was hooked. It was lean and mean, surprisingly feature-rich, and fairly stable. This was before Microsoft started giving away Express Edition licenses and at the time Dev-C++ seemed like a gift from heaven.



The IDE was the brainchild of Colin Laplace, with Mike Berg and Hongli Lai as contributors. It was coded in Delphi and open sourced under the GPL. It was a Windows-only IDE that used GCC/Mingw and made it really simple to get started with Win32 coding. I grabbed Dev-C++, armed myself with Windows 2000 Programming from the Ground Up, and dug in, creating some truly shitty applications but learning a lot along the way.

Remember This?
Whatever happened to this venerable IDE? Well, the original software has fallen into disrepair and the author is no longer supporting it. At least a few projects have sprung up, however, to keep the IDE running:

wxDev-C++: The devs on this project worked to fix bugs and create new enhancements, most notably creating a RAD tool for UI development with wxWidgets and dev-c++. There's not a lot of activity with the project currently (the last release was in 2012), but bugs are still being submitted and there is some activity on the forums, so I got the sense that there's still life in the project.

Orwell Dev-C++: This project is probably the rightful heir to the classic Dev-C++. After working with Dev-C++ for a couple of years, the developer decided to give it an update and has never stopped. The latest version shows 20K+ downloads this week, indicating that the IDE continues to be popular for C++ development on Windows.
The world of software development has changed a lot in ten years, and there are now plenty of free, robust options for C++ development environments. Even so, it's nice to see that this old battleaxe of an IDE is still surviving -- maybe even thriving -- thanks to some dedicated developers donating their free time to keeping it running.




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