Programming Philosophy
Unlike Java which is intended to be write once, run anywhere, Harbour aims to be write once, compile anywhere. As the same compiler is available for all of the above operating systems, there is no need for recoding to produce identical products for different platforms, except when operating system dependent features are used. Cross-compiling is supported with MinGW32. Under Microsoft Windows, Harbour is more stable but less well-documented than Clipper, but has multi-platform capability and is more transparent, customizable and can run from a USB flash drive.
Under Linux and Windows Mobile, Clipper source code can be compiled with Harbour with very little adaptation. Most software originally written to run on Xbase++, Flagship, FoxPro, xHarbour and others dialects can be compiled with Harbor with some adaptation. As 2010 many efforts have been made to turn the transition from other xBase dialects easier.
Harbour can use the following C compilers, among others: GCC, MinGW, Clang, ICC, Microsoft Visual C++ (6.0+), Borland C++, Watcom C, Pelles C and Sun Studio.
Harbour can make use of multiple Graphic Terminal emulations, including console drivers, and Hybrid Console/GUIs, such as GTWvt, and GTWvg.
Harbour supports external GUIs, free (e.g. HBQt, HWGui, MiniGUI (latest version based on Qt) and Qth) and commercial (e.g. FiveWin, Xailer). HBQt is a library provinding bindings to Qt. HBIDE application included in official distribution and SVN repository is a sample of HBQt potencial.
Harbour is 100% Clipper-compatible and supports many language syntax extensions including greatly extended run-time libraries such as OLE, Blat, OpenSSL, FreeImage, GD, TIP, Tpathy, PCRE, HbZip (zlib and bzip2), cURL, Cairo, its own implementation of CA-Tools and NanFor libraries and many others. Harbour has an active development community and extensive third party support.
Any xBase language provides a very productive way to build business and data intensive applications. Harbour is not an exception.
Read more about this topic: Harbour (software)
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