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Home » Community » Coffee corner » Number of U++ Developers/Users?
| Number of U++ Developers/Users? [message #28197] |
Sun, 22 August 2010 06:51  |
jeremy_c
Messages: 175
Registered: August 2007
Location: Ohio, USA
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Experienced Member |
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I'm just curious about the vitality of U++. It seems the forums here are sometimes slow which indicates to me not many people using it or developing it. Is that true?
How many active developers of U++ are there? i.e. people working on U++ itself, not using it in their own apps.
How many users of U++ are there? i.e. people using U++ in their own apps? I know this number may be hard to quantify but there must be some general opinion... 10, 100, 100,000,000?
Thanks,
Jeremy
[Updated on: Sun, 22 August 2010 06:52] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: Number of U++ Developers/Users? [message #28198 is a reply to message #28197] |
Sun, 22 August 2010 14:16  |
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| jeremy_c wrote on Sun, 22 August 2010 06:51 |
I'm just curious about the vitality of U++. It seems the forums here are sometimes slow which indicates to me not many people using it or developing it. Is that true?
How many active developers of U++ are there? i.e. people working on U++ itself, not using it in their own apps.
How many users of U++ are there? i.e. people using U++ in their own apps? I know this number may be hard to quantify but there must be some general opinion... 10, 100, 100,000,000?
Thanks,
Jeremy
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Hi Jeremy,
I think you can get the best idea about how many people develops U++ on the Authors page.
As for number of users, I would guess it is few hundreds, based on number of people registered on the forum (about 700, last time I looked). Some of them might be spammers, previous users and of course, there might be users who are not using the forum. But it might be a good first approximation 
Best regards,
Honza
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| Re: Number of U++ Developers/Users? [message #28227 is a reply to message #28197] |
Tue, 24 August 2010 10:07 |
cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007
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Ultimate Contributor |
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| jeremy_c wrote on Sun, 22 August 2010 07:51 |
I'm just curious about the vitality of U++.
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Well that depends a lot on how you define vitality. If you define it by the user base and number of trained individuals that can use your platform, then the vitality is low. I've seen plenty of people both corporate and technical ignoring some technology because of its niche status. If you define vitality by it technological prowess, I would say very high. If you define it based on the number of developers, U++ is not going anywhere. U++ is far from a one man project by the number of developers and that it's been around for 7? years publicly. Even if you would categorize it as a one man effort, the numbers speak of a high vitality.
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It seems the forums here are sometimes slow which indicates to me not many people using it or developing it. Is that true?
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There are a lot of people on the forum, but not all answer questions, and waiting a few days is not that much, especially with our user base. On other projects I've seen it is far worse. I have 3 where I still didn't get any answer after over a year and counting. Also, people tend to answer questions related to the domain they know. Mirek is the one with all encompassing view who can answer all your questions and he was always prompt before if he didn't miss the thread. I check the forum almost daily, but since I'm not using U++ actively right now for anything important, I tend to answer only simple questions or the ones related to the parts I know best or the ones I have written code for. I leave the rest of the questions to someone more qualified and usually the answer is not far  . Also, the people who are answering are the always the same, so you can figure out who usually answers.
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How many active developers of U++ are there? i.e. people working on U++ itself, not using it in their own apps.
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I believe none. I don't think that there is a single person who works only on U++ without using it in his or hers personal or work related projects. I think that most bug fixes and new features came from someone using U++ and seeing an area that can be improved. U++ came to be as an alternative to eliminate the burden of MFC if I'm not mistaken.
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How many users of U++ are there? i.e. people using U++ in their own apps? I know this number may be hard to quantify but there must be some general opinion... 10, 100, 100,000,000?
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All the people from above and a subset of the ones have registered on the forum and probably a number of people who never registered. It is impossible to tell. The number of downloads from SourceForge can help a little. Windows version of 2008.1 had over 8000 downloads. A lot of people downloaded it more than once, but it is unreasonable to believe that a handful of people accounts for the number of downloads. There are also the non mingw and deb versions, with over 2500 each. 2008.1 was the last version with rare release schedule (once or twice a year). After that it is a lot harder to get meaningful data from all the small releases.
My production environments consist of a heavily forked 2008.1 and a 1613 which I'm planning on upgrading to a never version. And have some recent versions for testing. So not everybody uses the latest version.
An interesting question is how many people came in contact with U++, what was the retention rate and with what impression did they leave. Emphasis on the last point.
But right now I don't think there is something we can improve on U++ to make it more popular. It is already stable, feature full and relatively simple to use. I have no idea what we could dedicate our collective effort for the next two months so that we could improve the retention rate of those who come in contact with U++. Other than transforming TheIDE into a perfect clone of Visual Studio or QtCreator.
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| Re: Number of U++ Developers/Users? [message #28319 is a reply to message #28314] |
Fri, 27 August 2010 11:51 |
pvozenilek
Messages: 14
Registered: June 2007
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Promising Member |
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| jerson wrote on Fri, 27 August 2010 02:47 |
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The documentation wasn't very helpful and the IDE itself gave no hint what one is doing. Eventually I admitted my inferiority and gave up.
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I agree with you that the documentation needs to be improved. However, all is not lost and I think I can be cited as a prime example here. From total newbie in C++/Upp in June, I am now an intermediate Upp level coder. Just 2 months of pain and a little help from friends on this forum is what it took to reach here.
I will say "perseverance pays". Perhaps others will agree with me.
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The problem is that I already have mental model how IDE work and this model has worked well for many of the tools (QtCreator is the other exception).
I have a larger application and UPP would help me to turn it multiplatform (the option to use different toolchains is a no-go for me). Its GUI would allow me to ged rid of message maps nightmare.
However the tool is so hard to crack for me that I do not dare to take the risks. Several executables, DLL based plugins, multiple versions (debug, profiled, custom, etc), absolute control over dependencies and outputs, ability to rebuild on a clean machine without any tinkering, ability to take out part of the project, develop it separately and then copy it back without need to modify the project. TheIDE may or may not provide this, who knows.
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| Re: Number of U++ Developers/Users? [message #28323 is a reply to message #28321] |
Fri, 27 August 2010 15:15 |
pvozenilek
Messages: 14
Registered: June 2007
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Promising Member |
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| cbpporter wrote on Fri, 27 August 2010 12:16 |
Well TheIDE is quite strong and should offer most of what you are looking for if you know how to use it to achieve such fine tuned control.
I don't.
For me, the real strength of TheIDE comes from the fact that it can completely eliminate traditional build process. You can use it to just say "NO!!!!!!!" to everything that is expected from a traditional C++ build process and replace it with something more simple and modular.
If you need to work with other projects or "legacy" tools, Visual Studios should be best for you. OR autotools. If you are ready to embrace packages, then give TheIDE a try.
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I do use Visual Studio and its main strength for me is: I can without hassle set up hierarchies of projects and it is easy to create settings both for a single project and for the whole project tree. It is also easy to set up hierarchy of build variants (debug, release, etc) and to assign settings for both single variant as well as for the whole variants tree.
The tool doesn't do any magic, no automatically inserted paths or libraries or compiler flags, I have everything under my control and get only what I explicitly ask for. (This was nightmare with the late Borland C++ Builder, it 'helped' so much that copying a project on a new machine was often simply impossible.)
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| Re: Number of U++ Developers/Users? [message #28338 is a reply to message #28323] |
Sun, 29 August 2010 20:29 |
281264
Messages: 272
Registered: June 2010
Location: Spain
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Experienced Member |
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U++ is great. However, from my point of view, the major disadvantage of U++ is the available information. The manual is certainly not written for beginners like me and, without a doubt, a good information (with many examples and starting from scratch) is crucial.
I wonder how many professional applications have been developed with U++ .
Javier
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