Which is more complete RobotC, NXC or lejos?

[barnabus]

Out of RobotC, NXC and leJOS which is the most complete programming language and why? leJOS was the first third party language I found and I was wondering what makes it better than NXC or RobotC?

[gloomyandy]

They are all different. NXC probably has the most complete 3rd party device support. RobotC is a commercially supported product and runs on systems other than the NXT. leJOS probably has the best support for an industry standard programming language and professional programming environment (Both NXc and RobotC are sort of C but do not support all of the language features, leJOS is a pretty complete Java implementation). Why not take a look at all three and draw your own conclusions (and post back here about them)...

[s.frings]

The GUI for NXC (BricxCC) is only available for Windows, while Lejos can be used with Netbeans and Eclipse on Linux, Windows and Mac.

NXC is similar than C but it implements only a subset of C, while Lejos is a full featured real Java language. However, the runtime library of Lejos is smaller than the runtime Library of Sun/Oracle Java with respect to the smaller available memory.

NXC has some limitations for the number and type of variables, number of procedures and number of threads that come from the NXT bytecode interpreter, while the Lejos JVM is only limited by the available memory (as far as I discovered). The hardest limitation of NBC is that it does not support pointers and dynamic memory allocation.

On the other hand, NXC runs on the original Lego Firmware, while Lejos requires to replace it. Which is technically simple but maybe not allowed in school.

[skoehler]

RobotC also requires the firmware to be replaced. Maybe one should also mention that leJOS has proper multi threading, while all other languages lack basic features in that area. For example, when I last checked, RobotC only allowed for 4 tasks to run in parallel and lacked any mechanism for synchronization like mutexes or condition variables. It didn't even have an atomic test and set statement, when I last looked.

These may be features, that only experiences programmers look for, but leJOS is fairly good in that area.