>> ...or rather, to /use/ run-time polymorphism, you need to do manual
>> memory management, and manual memory management is infamously hard.
>
> ... or use Boost's (or C++11's) smart pointers.

Wouldn't that mean I'd have to somehow install Boost and tell the IDE 
where the hell to find it?

Compared to that, manual memory management sounds trivial. :-P

>>> If you're using MS Visual Studio (or any other sane contemporary C++
>>> IDE), GUI programming is quite easy as well; after all, you have a GUI
>>> builder included.
>>
>> Yeah, but I'm told programming the Win32 APIs directly is incredibly
>> hard.
>
> Sane IDEs don't use the Win32 C API for GUI (or for most anything else
> for that matter); instead, they come with a fancy object-oriented
> framework of libraries hiding all the uglies from you. (MFC used to be
> the thing for MS Visual C++; they have something new by now, same thing
> they use for C#.)

Interesting. Is /that/ why I keep having to install the "VisualStudio 
C++ runtime" every few weeks?

> First time I ever wrote a C program that needed graphical output, I
> actually opted for using a printer rather than the computer display,
> because I already knew some PostScript :-P (Later I employed GhostScript
> of course; but only for test runs, as the "display" quality of the A3
> printer was unparalleled :-))

Oh, that's old skool! :-D

I'm told back in the days of the old mainframes, /all/ user output was 
through a printer. It literally didn't /have/ a video display /at all/. 
So the PRINT command in BASIC? It used to actually *print* stuff! :-D

Suddenly using HTML and HTTP to present a GUI doesn't seem quite so 
insane after all...

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