Visual Fortran, what a rip??

[delic]

Alright i just purchased Visual Fortran and unless I am misunderstanding this I am pretty shocked that Intel is getting away with selling this as they are..

It does not come with a linker so the compiler is useless without purchasing a linker? Which is unbelievable to me to sell a compiler without a linker...

Visual Studio is a requirement or no? I can not understand this..

This visual fortran product seems almost a crime to me. If I can not create an executable with it what use is it? Not too mention that the IDE does not come with it...

Now if all they were straight forward with these facts on the website it would not be so bad...

[Steven_L_Intel1]

The web site does say:

Software Requirements to Develop IA-32 Applications

• Windows NT* 4.0 with Service Pack 6 or higher, Windows 2000 , Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003
  Note: Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, and Windows Millennium Edition* are no longer supported for product development, but are supported for application deployment.
• Microsoft Visual C++* .NET 2002 or 2003 Standard Edition or later.

I agree that this could be made more prominent, and I have requested that it be made so.

We could have included a linker and everything else you needed - and charged you much more, due to MS licensing restrictions. Instead, if you already have MSVC, you don't pay double, and if you don't have it, you can use MSVC++.NET Standard, which retails for about $80.

If you would like to use the compiler in command line mode without a further purchase, see here.

[garyscott]

DoesMicrosoft charge more to license the product to you than they sell it for? That would be bizzare. I did notice that competing products that include it are pretty darn expensive compared to what they used to be.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

We could include the necessary pieces of Visual C++, without the compiler, the way Lahey does in their Professional Edition. But the royalty fee to MS would far exceed the cost of VC++ Standard. Note that Lahey charges $300 more for their Professional Edition. The alternative is that we could buy Visual C++ kits at list and "gluing" them to our boxes. It's a mess, with no really good solution.

Were still talking to MS to see if we can come up with something reasonable.

[TimP]

That C++ Toolkit 2003 method which Steve pointed out http://softwareforums.intel.com/ids/board/message?board.id=5&message.id=8873#M8873

works well for me, for small command line projects.

[garyscott]

I don't understand why they would be uncooperative. Surely they wouldn't be losing money on virtually any arrangement they made. From a marketing standpoint, it looks to me like they would want to "expand their dominance" by making the developer environment nearly "universal". Seems like shooting yourself in the foot if a reasonable licensing arrangement is not available (similar to the CVF model? or maybebetter (whatever that might mean)).

Oh well...spilt milk.