College student MBP questions

[rye9]

Okay, so I'm probably going to be entering a Bioengineering program, and I plan on picking up the new baseline 13" MBP. I know I'm going to have to take a class involving C++ programming, which requires Windows... and I plan to install the original Call of Duty perhaps to bring back some memories... and that would likely be the extent of my Windows Vista usage (I have a copy of the software waiting to be installed.)

Anyways, given this information, would VMware Fusion seem better than using Boot Camp? And if I do take the virtualization route, should I up the RAM from 2GB to 3 or more? I currently am running 10.4.11 on the last iBook revision ever produced with 1GB of RAM comfortably... so to me 2GB sounds great but I haven't been on Leopard yet to know how RAM gets eaten up. Also, I plan to spend the 30 bucks to get SL... if that should affect my RAM purchases please let me know too.

Basically this is just a question about RAM and virtualization... and these are my circumstances... hopefully I can get some advice!

 

[Hellhammer]

Buy RAM from 3rd party, eg Crucial. Running two OSs at the same time needs much RAM.

If you'll be using Windows for most of the time, I recommend you to get PC laptop. You won't get any benefit from Mac and OS X if you have to work on Windows

 

[psyichic]

I will speak from personal experience regarding programming in C on Windows and tell you that it is not at all fun and easy depending upon which IDE you want to do. If anything it will be a hell lot easier for you to use OS X to program it.

Now I don't know too much about OS X but from what I know it should have a built in debugger in the OS like any other UNIX based OS. Windows on the other hand does not. Windows gave me so many headaches trying to set-up Eclipse to run a C++ debugger that I almost lost my mind.

I am guessing you intend to use Microsoft Visual Studio as your IDE, I would strongly recommend against that unless the class you are taking specifically uses that. If you are given a choice of IDEs use either NetBeans or Eclipse both of which are multi platform.

Those are more suggestions from me on the programming side of your work though I am not a Mac expert here at all but I just thought I would lend you some of my experiences with C/C++ development on Windows (It just plain sucks). If you were honestly going to install a second OS for programming C++ just go with a Linux Distro like RedHat, it will save you so much time and so many headaches.

 

[Pommy]

I know I'm going to have to take a class involving C++ programming, which requires Windows...

Why not use XCode?

Anyways, for virtualization, if you don't want to spend money VirtualBox is an awesome free VM (I actually like it better than Parallels ... never used Fusion before so I dunno). Only downside it has to Parallels is that it can't use a Boot Camp partition (you have to use a virtual drive). But that might change.

 

[imthekuni]

Why not use XCode?

I am also a undergraduate bioengineering student and have successfully used XCode to code in C++, also COMSOL (FEM) works well in 10.5.7 and supports multicore processing (Hello Grand Central). The only problem is that MATLAB runs terribly slow under OS X and from what I read nothing is being done to fix it currently. I intend to triple boot Ubuntu, Vista, and SL when I buy my new 15" mbp. But back to C++, I also ran Microsoft Visual Studio to code through VMware Fusion on Windows XP no problem (have not ried with Vista yet)

 

[rye9]

Yeah I'd get RAM from Crucial without a doubt... that's where I went to upgrade my RAM on my current iBook. And thanks for the suggestion, however I am not going to get a PC. I'm a Mac user at heart and I would only need Windows for homework for the one class. I just asked a friend what exactly I'll be using so when I find out I'll post it here.

 

[TheReef]

I will speak from personal experience regarding programming in C on Windows and tell you that it is not at all fun and easy depending upon which IDE you want to do. If anything it will be a hell lot easier for you to use OS X to program it.

Now I don't know too much about OS X but from what I know it should have a built in debugger in the OS like any other UNIX based OS. Windows on the other hand does not. Windows gave me so many headaches trying to set-up Eclipse to run a C++ debugger that I almost lost my mind.

I am guessing you intend to use Microsoft Visual Studio as your IDE, I would strongly recommend against that unless the class you are taking specifically uses that. If you are given a choice of IDEs use either NetBeans or Eclipse both of which are multi platform.

Those are more suggestions from me on the programming side of your work though I am not a Mac expert here at all but I just thought I would lend you some of my experiences with C/C++ development on Windows (It just plain sucks). If you were honestly going to install a second OS for programming C++ just go with a Linux Distro like RedHat, it will save you so much time and so many headaches.

Yeah, UNIX based systems would be your best bet.

You can install developer tools, then code in a single Xcode source view window and use the g++ compiler from Terminal.

(Otherwise you'll have to make Xcode c++ tool projects which are messy for just a simple single file)

 

[rye9]

Okay I found out that the class uses the free program Dev C++ for programming assignments... so that's all I'll need for that class that requires Windows. Knowing this, should I stick with Boot Camp or is virtualization a better route?

I apologize for not knowing what Xcode and everything else is... and I'm going to be stubborn and just say no since I'd prefer to stick to the course's methods anyways.

 

[66Replica]

In my two years of experience in Computer Science at a university, I coded all my projects in Xcode or through Terminal in VI or similar. Even though the class would say we should use "Fill in the blank here" program, I would always just use Xcode or Terminal and it worked out fine. I programmed C, C++ and java.

 

[theLimit]

The only time I used Windows for programming was when programming a Windows program. (wow, say that ten times fast )

Even then, I still did half my coding on my PowerBook at home and then just tested it on the Windows machines when I got to school.

 

[miles01110]

If you plan on running virtualized software then upgrading the RAM should be a priority. While it's true you can use XCode to do C++, there are command line tools (like the g++ compiler) that will run just fine natively as others have mentioned. Boot Camp will be faster than VMWare, but how much faster depends on the program.