Visual Basic or C++?

[ACM]

Right, I'm currently working on a soccer database project. I've been working on it for over a year now. It's currently all Excelbased and that will be the case for the immediate future. But in the future I do want to make it a proper application so it's professional.

The aim of my soccer database is to provide stats on every player in the English Premier League and results and data on every game too. Yes, I mean every season ever played. That's a hell of a lot of data in the making. So far, I have created a foundation on Excel to build upon. VBA has been used in my Excel file to do various things such as allow the user to enter new league results and to update the league table.

I have a little bit of VBA knowledge, certainly enough to do the simplistic things I've wanted to do so far in Excel. I also have a basic understanding of Visual Basic, but no more than that.

I want to know what would be the better language to build an application like this. Visual Basic or C++? I don't have any C++ knowledge so far, but I can always learn. You have to remember, this is very much a static program and a lot of it is database driven.

So if someone could weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of Visual Basic and C++ that would be great. Thanks.

 

[jmcilhinney]

VB is primarily a RAD (rapid application development) tool. It's focus is developer productivity. In doing so, some code can be less than optimal, although that doesn't really matter in a great many cases, because a Windows app will spend most of its time waiting for the user to do something anyway.

C++ is a lower level language so it provides more opportunity for optimisation. As such, C++ is good for heavy duty number crunching.

For a Windows app that shuffles data to and from a database, you could use either. That said, a decent VB developer would whip it up more quickly than a similarly skilled C++ developer. Unless you already have knowledge of C++, I'd say that VB is the better option for this project by a fairly big margin. VB will take you less time to learn as well.