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As we are (me and people I work with) more and more frustrated while working with C++ projects 250 000+ LOC in VS2010 sp1 (the slowness of this IDE is just unbelievable), in my company we were talking about migrating our code to some different IDE. We did some research, and a strong candidate seems to be Embarcadero C++ builder 2011 XE. Any thoughts on it? Is it any good? How does it compares to VS2010 ultimate?
I've been using C++ Builder since 1.0 and I hate it with a passion. You would think after all these years, simple little annoyances would be fixed by now but they are not. Here is a list of issues I have with C++ Builder IDE.
Your layout or personality never is maintained. You create one, save it and it only applies to certain things. For example the debugger window will not maintain its position nor will the message window. If you detach the project explorer it will sometimes dissappear. Most of the time reloading your personality doesn't fix this either. You are stuck dragging your windows back into place.
The debugger will sometimes work and sometimes not work. In a debug build if you set a break point and begin stepping through code, you can hover over a variable to inspect it. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't work on the exact same variable. Crazy!
Eclipse looks for code mistakes like if you forget to put a semi-colon at the end of your statement, it puts a little ? mark in the margin. C++ Builder doesn't do anything like this. It gives you a cryptic compile time error message.
Recent versions of C++ Builder use a makefile similar to VS; it's an XML mess. Eclipse works with CMake and Makefiles. I've read in places that the CMake maintainers are looking for a C++Builder generator but last I checked this doesn't exist. I do embedded and cross compiling so sometimes my C++ Builder code is copied to my embedded development environment or shared with it and I wind up maintaining two build environments.
Not really an IDE but C++Builder does not take advantage of multiple CPUs to compile code. There is, however, a 3rd party tool you can spend more money on to get this. It's called TwineCompile (http://www.jomitech.com/twine.php). With Eclipse, they call out to whatever compiler you're using (gcc, etc...) and those compilers and make support -j option.
C++Builder comes with a limited version of AQTime which is a dynamic code profiler. Spend more and you get the more advanced version. Eclipse supports many dynamic and static code analysis (which also cost $$) but at least the plugins are there. We use Klockworx.
C++ Builder has no support, that I'm aware of, for external source control like GIT. Eclipse does. C++ Builder comes with subversion, I think, built-in. If it supports GIT, I could never get it to work. It tells me it doesn't understand the URL scheme when I give it a git path.
Certain template code I write causes the compiler to segfault and have to completely restart the IDE. This is nuts to me. You have a compiler that is 10+ years old and it's still segfaulting. I have a piece of C++ template code that when I take it to my work computer running exact same version of C++ Builder, it compiles OK, but on my home machine it segfaults. I'm absolutely sure there are no adverse factors at play like viruses, etc...
While compiling a large project that may take a long time, you are unable to browse code with the IDE. Sometimes you may see a compiler warning scroll by and you have to either wait for the compile job to complete to inspect the mentioned line or use an alternate means to open the file.
C++ Builder IDE has a concept of a Project Group with sub projects that are more/less self contained. The Project Group has no concept of a project group include/link path like the sub-projects have. Sub-projects have a base, debug, release paths where debug and release can inherit or block from the base but you don't have this at the project group level. The IDE has global settings which can be inherited but it's for everything you do in the IDE. So there is no way to modify for a given project group, just the include/linker paths for a set of sub-projects. I just think they could have done a better job with this.
C++ Builder's Build output is not color coded to, for example, show errors in red and warnings in some other color. Everything is black and white. VC and Eclipse color code and give option to change colors for various warnings and errors. The output tab in C++ Builder is same way. On big projects, it's very difficult to investigate compiler warnings with the other noise. In C++ Builder's IDE you can select level of warnings but this only affects output in the Output tab and you still get other stupid noise like letting me know its deleting linker state files "CleanLinkerStateFiles."
Unless you're doing Windows desktop GUI development, stay away from Embarcadero/C++ Builder. I started using C++ Builder version 1 back in the Borland days and have a few large projects that are heavily invested in the VCL so I'm stuck with it for those projects but all my new projects, I've been using Eclipse.
On a positive note about C++ Builder, the VCL is quite nice. It's not multi-threaded but it's nice for creating a desktop GUI app really quick. I think it's much faster to get a C++ based GUI app up in CBuilder than it is in VS. And there appears to be a ton of free and paid GUI components for CBuilder; again with a C++ focus. I know C# + VS has a wealth of GUI controls.
UPDATE:
I just ran into a problem today that is same as the one mentioned in this forum:
http://qc.embarcadero.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=57631
[ILINK32 Warning] Warning: Error detected (ILI4536)
Make up your mind. Is it a warning or a god dam error?
Scroll all the way to the end where you find individuals modifying ILINK32.EXE to get it working again. As of this morning, our builds stop working. We're dead in the water as we scramble to understand and find out what to do about this.
Is this the kind of compiler/IDE you want to depend on? Again, this product has been around for more than a decade and it still has issues like this. I find this completely unacceptable. Crap product from a company that doesn't give a shit.
Not actually an answer, but I'll just leave it here:
It costs money (yes, VS too, but you already own that, don't you?)
It will be not too easy to migrate a big enough project to new IDE (and compiler), not to say about the people you work with and their habits (I would just quit probably).
There's a new compiler too, with its brand bugs and caveats to learn about. And it's much less widely used than VC++. However, it's based on Clang, which should support standards better than VC++, and be easier to port existing C++ code to.
The difficulty of migrating hugely depends on the nature of your project (is it GUI based, how deeply does it rely on MS VC++ being the compiler?)
There is nothing positive about Embarcadero XE, neither their aging IDE neither their aging compiler. Only use it if you're bound to it (legacy software) or if you want to do Delphi.
For C++, do yourself a favor and join 21st century : stick with something more powerful, versatile and modern such as VC++ or Qt.
This question is really a matter of personal opinion.
I personally HATE Visual Studio with a passion, I avoid it like the plague. My exposure to Eclipse has been limited to Java, but even then I've had a hard time working with it.
I have been using C++Builder for 15 years, since v3.0 all the way up to the latest XE6. Yes, it has quirks and limitations, but I still find it the easiest IDE for me to work with and be productive with, once you know how to work with (or around) them. Maybe my experience with it is hindering my ability to work with other IDEs, but so be it. I still prefer C++Builder over any other. But I only use it for Windows development (the VCL is very mature and robust), I don't do cross-platform development with it yet (FireMonkey still has a ways to go to evolve and mature). And I do use plenty of open-source projects with it. Yes, sometimes I have to tweak their projects and/or code to make them compile, but that it usually a one-time deal and then they work fine.
I'd suggest Eclipse.
As an IDE, it takes a little while to get used too, but it is well
worth the effort.
It's available for Mac OS, Linux and Windows.
You need to have Java installed on your computer, but that's
really a non - issue.
It supports Cygwin, MinGW, and the MicrosoftVisual C++ toolchains. The build in CDT Builder is pretty good too.
You can use it to develop for languages other than C++ (Java , JavaScript, PHP ..)
You can extend it's functionality by installing plugins
IT'S FREE!
Did I mention that it has a built in Web Browser ? Really useful for referring to online documentation, while coding.
1.
We have a solution over 1M LOC and VS2010 handles it ok. We especially like /MP switch for compiling on all available CPU cores.
You did not specify your hardware. If you don't yet run on at least i7-2600 + fast SSD, I suggest trying hardware upgrade first.
2.
I used to use Borland tools a lot in the past. Delphi was rather stable; C++ Builder was much more buggy. Couple of years ago I helped to upgrade old Delphi projects to newer Delphi IDE with some service packs installed. And it had bugs even in the basic File IO APIs which have worked since Turbo Pascal. We had to downgrade to a previous version. I expect that quality of C++ Builder won't be much better than of VS2010.
3.
You did not specify what exactly is slow. You may want to convert some projects into components compiled separately. Also make sure you use PCH.
Also it worth investigating if you abuse C++ inclusion model by including a lot of unneeded header files in each and every unit. If, after preprocessing, Intellisense and compiler have to deal with huge amount of code, no IDE can help.
I have not used Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate for C++, rather C# and C# web services development. That being said, as a test between VS 2010 Ultimate and C++Builder XE, I have created a simple VS C++ Windows Forms application to click a button and show "Hello World" through an event handler. Getting the button onto the VS Window Designer is okay, as long as you remember to access View | Toolbox. If not, it will take some time to track down where the visual components are hanging out.
For reasons that do not make any language sense, the button click event handler has a signature that looks like:
System::Void button1_Click(System::Object^ sender, System::EventArgs^ e) {
}
and it goes to the header file as one would expect. The ^ symbol makes little sense. Does using it tie into the CLI/CLR better? I expected a * to indicate a pointer.
After using the default Form1 (only header file created) and subsequently adding a new windows form, I finally obtained the respective cpp file. Maybe the C++ Windows Form Wizard has a bug. Who knows? Anyhow, when adding the button click event by double clicking the button in the designer, the cpp does not obtain the method in either cpp form I tested. Maybe this is normal, I do not know. The end result of this is that after trying to use the MessageBox function within the cpp, it only caused compilation errors. I am sure there is yet another header file that has to be in the include path. I spent no time tracking this down. Trying to set a label component text property caused compilation errors too. About 20 minutes later, I went to C++Builder XE3 in frustration.
In C++Builder, I have tested VCL Forms, FireMonkey Desktop, and FireMonkey Metropolis application creation from the project wizard. Sure enough, I have three different applications saying, "Hello World," in about three minutes total, all calling C++Builder's built in global shortcut function called ShowMessage("insert message here"). The timing could have been slightly different as I did not time it with a stop watch. It took longer to save files with meaningful names than the code itself: one line of typing in the respective click event body in each cpp (not the header).
The other main daily use gotcha with VS, for those of us who love the Brief key map, is that VS is highly challenging to configure into Brief. When doing heavy development in C#, I use C++Builder's editor in Brief mode, saving files as often as I want. VS does correctly detect file updates as you click back to the VS IDE.
On the slowness mentioned by the OP above, I suggest also looking very closely at the hardware platform relative to running Visual Studio. I have noticed that if the .Net framework is out of date, VS will be slow within the IDE. It does not seem to matter which language the project is in either. I use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate on Parallels with Windows XP Pro, with 2 virtual cores. Generally, VS responds normally within the IDE. While using it, I am NOT thinking, "VS is soooo slow."
Regarding migrating a quarter million lines to C++Builder from VS, I am not sure whether VS event handlers will convert by some wizard or other migration tool. The ^ symbol, if consistently used in all event handlers, may not be a big deal for a regular expression conversion that is custom written. If the project is very thin on the user interface layer and heavy in business rules and data, converting to C++Builder should be relatively easy. I would expect some new coding for the new user interface click events passing the user interaction into the other layers. For prototyping, using data aware components are likely your best bet. In normal application running, expect to have the business rules layer use the STL and built in C++Builder data structures (even the AnsiString c_str() method) to interact with non data aware components. The performance and user experience will likely improve.
Start Edit
A big knock on C++Builder XE3 (note this is two releases behind the current one of five) is that the 64-bit Windows support is only for console applications. The knock is more from not being frequently broadcast on how to use the Add Platform sub-menu that appears when right clicking the mouse over the Target Platforms choice in the Project tree view. This quick method to add more platforms to a project after it may first be targeting 32-bit Windows is virtually painless. A new sub-dialog appears after clicking the sole sub-menu choice and a drop down box appears to select the new operating system and respective 32-bit or 64-bit versions. In my opinion, Embarcadero is not demonstrating often enough how simple it is to add other target platforms. So, to ease all developer's pain if this is not known in advance, I have found three web pages on the Embarcadero site. The first one has pretty pictures of creating a FireMonkey desktop application. Step 5 has the screen capture of the Target Platforms | Add Platform sub-menu choice for adding the Mac OS X platform. It is here titled Creating Your First FireMonkey Application for Desktop Platforms (C++): http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE2/en/Creating_Your_First_FireMonkey_Application_for_Desktop_Platforms_%28C%2B%2B%29
The more terse and no picture procedure is here titled Steps in Creating Cross-Platform Applications:
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE2/en/Steps_in_Creating_Cross-Platform_Applications
The Windows centric procedure and a small screen capture is here titled 64-bit Cross-Platform Application Development for Windows:
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE3/en/64-bit_Cross-Platform_Application_Development_for_Windows
I have found on an Embarcadero forum post that an upgrade to the Update 1 XE3 release from the original XE3 release has a Target Platform selection issue. There can be an internal path setting or two that is incorrect, and possibly having to change an original XE3 project file (.cbproj) to enable Win64. Apparently the original release project file has this set to false.
XE5 (note version five as of December 2013) is supposed to have 64-bit Windows support for both console and forms applications (e.g. VCL, FireMonkey Desktop, FireMonkey Metropolis), OS X, iOS (Android coming sometime soon). For the complete list, review the C++Builder feature matrix pdf for all of the XE5 details:
http://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder/cbuilder-feature-matrix.pdf
Since the XE3 Update 1 has been shown to resolve Target Platform selection issues, when compared to the original XE3, there should not be any weird behaviors. I have also come across an Embarcadero post that states from a TeamB member that for mobile applications, the Target Platform choices are filtered such that mixing a desktop platform project with a mobile one is not allowed. So, if one wanted to try creating a desktop application and then with a mouse click force it into an iPhone, some other development tool will have to be used. C++Builder and/or Delphi will not attempt to squeeze desktop components onto a mobile device. You have to start with a mobile application project. Here is the forum link:
https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=96371
(End Edit)
If curious about my overall background, I have used C++Builder since version one, Visual Studio .NET (C# 1.0) and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. It seems like Visual Studio concentrates on C# more than any other language. There are eighteen C# projects and fifteen C++ projects when selecting File | New Project. To reach the Visual Studio C++ project area, make sure to reach it by opening the "Other Languages" sub-tree.
In recent Internet posts between Visual Studio latest and greatest and C++Builder latest and greatest, purchase prices vary in the thousands of dollars. Even if never ever having an installation to upgrade either tool, C++Builder remains a bargain compared to Visual Studio. Please conduct thorough research before spending your hard earned cash. Hopefully both tools have 30-day trial installations to compare side by side, as your mileage may vary.
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I've had it of those dozens of editors which never provides simple things like:
distinguish type keywords and instruction keywords so I can put different colors on them.
being cross platform using a standard GUI lib like qt gtk etc (notepad++, yes, I almost hate you).
enough keyboard shortcut like duplicate line, comment selection, and a decent find-replace.
Decent task-easing features like single-click-on-the-number-line-margin to select the entire line.
Scintilla or another good-enough lexer that highlights enough different things, because brain-compiling code is one thing, quickly identify with the eyes what is what is something I find important.
I just want to support very basic languages like C, C++, maybe Python, not HTML or CSS.
Is Scintilla a good choice to just highlight those languages, and is a lexer really necessary ?
Isn't QT enough to program a text editor such as the one I want to do ? I know there is QScintilla, but is there a reason I shouldn't use a lib that integrates a lexer ? Why is Scintilla such a good lib ?
Is QT a good choice for such an editor ? (I also want to hard embed ProFont in the editor to kill any reluctant font problem between OSes).
EDIT:
In short, I want to make an editor, only with the same syntax highlight features of notepad++. That's my main goal, and the use of QScintilla might be a little harder than I thought...
EDIT2:
Well I found textadept, it's not so known but is quite awesome. I didn't manage to make my lexer, since I have other to do which I do under windows, unfortunately it's slow on the mac. Apparently there isn't any Scite official build for the mac.
C++ is not a "very basic language" by any stretch of the imagination.
Why do you really want to do this? There are SOOO many open source code editors out there.
If you must write your own editor, I suggest looking at the other open source editors and examine which pieces you port to your editor.
Porting pieces of existing working and tested code is usually much better than writing your own code and debugging it.
After perusing a couple serious open source editors: Emacs, Eclips, CodeBlocks, CodeLight, etc., I believe you will start changing your mind about writing an editor from scratch.
-- Thomas Matthews
My Info
If you really want to do this (and it sounds like a lot of work) I would look at ANTLR for parsing the code. You may get some ideas from their ANTLRWorks display.
To link the parse tree to a display could be a fair amount of work so I'd see what an IDE platform such as Eclipse has to offer
Are you OK with Java?
If so, go for Eclipse technologies: SWT and JFace. The latter provides you with org.eclipse.jface.text package with a lot of features. Then you can roll own editor easily basing on that. (I prefer Eclipse-based editors to Scintilla-based, I believe they tend to be more advanced and feature-rich, but that's my personal opinion.)
But then, you might want to go a step further and use the Eclipse RCP framework for you application... But then why not use the Eclipse IDE itself and just add whatever you want as plug-ins.
The Eclipse codebase is huge and it's up to you how much you want to reuse.
I would expend some effort experimenting with the emacs colour theme package and the various langauge modes; see if you can bend the lisp to do what you want. You almost certainly can. to my mind emacs and a bit of effort on your part will get you your ultimate editor (remember emacs is really just a DIY editor toolkit). If you cant bend emacs into the shape you want you will be well placed to expend the effort in writing your own.
I have tried to do something similar myself for a project I'm working on at the moment, I looked into the QScintilla and had to remove it from my project because when you embedded inside a QGraphicsView I can't control the resolution of the widgets image, it seems to paint the text as an image and that's what we see, I played with increasing the smoothness of the QFont and that improved it but still a no-go.
So I found a simple code editor inside QT's code base it comes with every installation of QT if you look
into:
C:\Qt\4.7.3\src\scripttools\debugging\qscriptedit.h
C:\Qt\4.7.3\src\scripttools\debugging\qscriptedit.cpp
If you go to the source code of OpenShapeFactory where I'm trying to embed a Code Editor: check how I got the syntax Highlighter and the autocomplete :
this widget uses the qscriptedit widget that ships with qt, you can add your own keywords to the syntax hightlighter from a file as well as for the auto-complete dropdownlist.
this is the header, scriptwidget.h and the implementation scriptwidget.cpp are available as part of the whole project code.
the next stage is to look into the QTCreator and see the code they already have all if not most of these features after you get to compile their version, just find where to add your little mods and you might be getting closer to the simple code editor.
I wish you the best of luck on this direction and if you find a solution please send it over, :)
heads-up keep a lookout for the repository link above, if I find a way of making it first, I might chase you to the answer.
Like everyone else is saying, it's probably more trouble than it's worth, but if you really want to do it, Qt's a good choice since it's cross platform. Use QSyntaxHighlighter to do your keyword/type highlighting, and take full advantage Qt's support for keyboard shortcuts.
use something like C, QT and Lua for the scripting engine.
For those who are using vim/emacs/terminals,etc (ie, not an IDE proper) what sort of projects are you working on? Are they big? Production? Are these the tools you use at work? Or mostly for smaller things...or big things broken into small things? Sorry...enough questions.
I ask because I'm studying computer science right now, and am super excited about it. I had an internship programming J2ME for a government agency recently and it was Netbeans and eclipse all the way. So I've only had a few "minor-league" years in the business.
In short, what is practical for the CL type tools, versus an IDE such as 'beans and VS. I've got a lot to learn, and the CL tools will probably teach me, versus shielding me like an full on IDE might.
What sort of projects are you working on?
All kind... vim is my main "IDE" anywhere
Are they big?
Yes... My FOSS project CppCMS written almost 100% in vim
Production?
Yes, most of production code (Not FOSS) I write today I use vim.
Are these the tools you use at work?
Yes.
I would explain severak simple things:
vim provides almost all tools IDE does, highlighting, spellcheck, autocomplition, working with multiple buffers, build, context "jumps" (decl, def) and much more
It is extreamly portable, I work with it on Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, Solaris, FreeBSD.
It is very light in comparison to bloated IDE.
There is only one thing I do use IDE today: debugging hard bugs.
Emacs/Vim can be used for any sized projects.
Generally, you won't get to choose the environment, the job you find will have one already picked out for you (unless it's non-Java programming in Unix, in which case use what you want).
I wouldn't sweat the choice, just learn to use which ever editor/IDE is available to its utmost extent.
I use (and have used) Emacs for personal projects, and in two different companies on software projects exceeding 10M lines of production code each.
I use emacs. I would recommend emacs. I have used emacs since before it was emacs: TECO, TV, and the e macro package on the Decsystem-20.
I can use vim if I need to but what you learn is largely what is at hand and you get into.
Yes, learn one or both. And I would say, if the IDE fits, wear it too.
I use vim for everything, I hate IDEs, they're too bloated for me.
I haven't used it for any massive projects (because I haven't written any massive projects), but if I were going to, I would still use vim.
When learning I new language, I believe it's best to not use IDEs at all, and to learn the "proper" way of doing it (like for c++, learning the command line switches and using makefiles).
Twenty years ago all my programming was done in plain text editors, mostly emacs, but technology has improved over the years.
I still do use plain text editors to write code occasionally, but only when it is inconvenient to install an IDE on the machine where I'm writing code. For example, a few times I've stopped by a client site without my laptop and wanted to write a quick program.
This is also an issue with certain embedded systems, where you may want to update the code interactively through a RS232 or USB based command line interface.
Most modern IDEs provide enough acceleration to the code editing process that I will install one whenever I expect to use the computer for development for more than two or three hours.
I use vim for everything from small one-off scripts to 1000+ line production code. It is so versatile that working in any other environment seems constricting. If I'm part of a project that necessitates a standard environment (IDE) then I'll do as much coding as I can in vim and then import into the ide.
I believe everyone should be able to operate effectively in a command-line environment. You can't always be sure that anything except the basic tools will be available on the target machines, you can't be sure that you'll have enough system to pull up a full IDE, and you might actually find the system you're building is too complicated for an IDE.
I've built systems that have consisted of multiple interoperating clients and servers distributed across multiple physical machines. In these efforts, I have used command line tools almost exclusively in the server side. I will use DDD when I can, but I also know the underlying gdb. If the clients are Windows, I'll use the Visual Studio IDE, but if they're UNIX, I'll go with the command line.
Figure out how to work effectively using minimal tools. You'll be a better developer and you'll actually appreciate the integrated tools more, if they're done better.
BTW, I put Emacs in the IDE class. I've got a friend who comes in and fires it up first thing and doesn't leave the environment all day. It's more than an IDE, in fact, since he does mail, surfing, etc. in the thing, or so he tells me.
For large projects with 100+ files, using an IDE is very important. But there are lots of small small things which you need to keep doing all the time while working on even large projects. Firing up the IDE for all of these may not be worthwhile. Having a good command on a powerful editor like Vim or Emacs is something I would consider as an essential skill for any programmer. But an appropriate IDE should also be used to accelerate regular development work as per project needs.
Hmm... Well, look at it this way:
I open code in emacs. I edit it. I use code completion (and I've even played with intellisense emacs)... When I'm ready to compile, I hit CTRL+F7... A key I've bound... It builds in a small popup window... If there are any errors, I can jump to them in the code by hitting f8 (another bound key)... Once it's all building, I hit f5... (this runs a little program I wrote that parses the Makefile and determines the path the executable)... This starts the debugger in a small popup window... I can click on code lines to set break points... etc... I debug... I can "next" through the code with F10... I can "step" through the code with F11 (more key bindings)... When it's all done I hit Shift-F7 to package (.rpm) the project.
So, do I have an IDE? Or am I just using a plain text editor?
1. Yes. 2. Any kind of project.
There is no limit to the size of a system that can be developed in Vim/Emacs/Unix, in fact, there are fewer limits than there are in IDE's. Let's look at a few things I use...
SYSTEM LINES OF CODE
Linux kernel 10,000,000
NetBSD 4,000,000
Ruby 200,000
Those are pretty big systems.
I don't believe any of them were developed with IDE software.
I tend to agree that for learning it is a good idea to understand the basics: the fact that you edit the code, you compile it with a compiler, link it with a linker, debug it with a debugger.
It makes it easier to grasp the concepts. And it makes easier to move from platform to platform.
So, learn vi, make, gdb, some version control system (git, svn).
But for production I would say that getting familiar with the "standard IDE" of the environment is a must (Visual Studio for Windows, XCode for Mac OS, Eclipse for Java, etc.)
No mater what other say, mastering an IDE will increase your productivity.
If you used vi/emacs for 10 years and try Eclipse or Visual Studio for few days, you will say that they are bloated and don't offer anything in exchange. That's BS. The more open minded you are, the better you will be.
I use Emacs to develop commercial software with size of several millions LoC, and massive use of templates, etc. I use CEDET + gnu global as auxiliary packages + yasnippet, etc.
well...I have to say that I'm a vimmer. Using a IDE, I don't to care so many things like when you use editor like vim/emacs. But when you do a bit more, you will find the IDE you use is more hindering than helping in your program developping process. alas...if you insist in using vim/emacs as your editor, you will encounter "a deep learning curve", you will waste so many time even to acchieve so trivial a function in your editor,you will be desperate when you are busy catching up with your timetable if you just pick them up......you have to settle down and start leaning and also playing with editors and a couple of days, you will find you've already achieve more than you can ever expect!
My standard IDE is a flock of xterms running some mix of vim editors, man page documentation, debuggers, log tails, and command lines to execute things, plus an instance of Firefox for pulling up additional docs or (where applicable) testing web-based code. This is what I use for all projects these days, regardless of size, whether personal or professional.
Pretty much the only time I've seen real benefit to using an IDE has been when I've been working on platform-native GUI apps, where they make it so much easier to build forms and wire up their controls. But I haven't done that sort of work in over a decade - the last one I did was in Deplhi, back when Borland still owned it; I think version 4 had just come out, although it might have been 3.
Emacs is a great tool (so is Vim) for programming, and I use them to develop my code for physics research. As added benefit (for me) Emacs handles remote files nicely via Tramp, so that's big boom for me since I very often have to visit remote servers.
With that said, every time I need to write an application with a GUI and within a large framework (like c# with .NET or the android framework) I always find it hard to development with just emacs. The IDEs (Visual Studio, Eclipse) simply have everything including autocomplete and lookup with appropriate content from the framework, and debugging, even though code writing part is always unsatisfactory (I always end up installing some sort of emacs plugin for the IDE, which always fall short of Emacs proper!).
Sometimes it just takes too long to setup an environment in Emacs for those kinds of projects since that is not the default way envisioned by the designers, and having an environment that works out of box is so much easier than banging my head against the wall to find usually obscure information on how to compile/debug those app without using the designated IDE.
We could sum things up by saying that editors like emacs / vi implements some of the functionnalities of IDEs by using CL tools (or the libs behind the CL tools).
Your main issue in using an editor as an IDE would be :
configuring it to have exactly the functionnalities you are happy with in an IDE is not necessarily straigh-forward (I ask for sympathy from anyone who ever tried to configure CEDET ;) ), as opposed to working out-of-the-box with IDEs
the way such functionnalities work in editors is very tied to CL, so you need at least a vague understanding of the CL beforehand.
The advantages are the fact that CL tools are sometimes more ubiquitous than IDEs. Also mastering CL opens the door to scripting your build ("make a build in one command" as opposed to "make a build in one click"), which opens the door to automated nighly builds, continuous integration, etc... all of which are harder to setup if your understanding of the build stops at hitting F6 or whatever.
I am new to c# and VS, but I am getting it. The application is this: A program in which the end result will draw a spider from options in which the user will define. Lets say there are 100s of options: size and number of body parts, color, connections points to the body, etc.
First question: Should I try to use the library included with VS 2005? Or, is there another environment in which I could "tap into" to get good results (flash, java, etc.)?
Second Question: Could you direct me to information corresponding to your answer from the first question?
Thanks so much, the kids I teach will love it!
Jennifer
Hmm.
This is truly a rough question, not because I don't know how to do it, but because it can often be so ridiculously daunting for beginners. If you use the "standard" Windows Forms C# method of doing it, you'll end up asking yourself, "What the #*(&! is WM_PAINT?" or "Why does my program totally get messed up when I move a window over my picture?!"
There are basically two main technologies that you can use to do drawing in .NET : Windows Forms (what MusiGenesis suggested) and WPF, or Windows Presentation Foundation, which ships with the 3.0 version of Visual Studio. That means that if you download the .NET 3.5 SDK or use Visual Studio 2008, WPF comes with it.
I'd recommend using WPF instead of Windows forms if you're just starting off, because the dirty details of drawing and repainting are largely abstracted. You can also define a lot of your picture as markup, just like a web page, and then manipulate it in code. Good luck and have fun!
Here is a link to some examples of how to draw things with C#:
http://www.geekpedia.com/tutorial50_Drawing-with-Csharp.html
This example uses just the built-in graphics methods of .NET, so you won't need any other libraries.
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Briefly: Does anyone know of a GUI for gdb that brings it on par or close to the feature set you get in the more recent version of Visual C++?
In detail: As someone who has spent a lot of time programming in Windows, one of the larger stumbling blocks I've found whenever I have to code C++ in Linux is that debugging anything using commandline gdb takes me several times longer than it does in Visual Studio, and it does not seem to be getting better with practice. Some things are just easier or faster to express graphically.
Specifically, I'm looking for a GUI that:
Handles all the basics like stepping over & into code, watch variables and breakpoints
Understands and can display the contents of complex & nested C++ data types
Doesn't get confused by and preferably can intelligently step through templated code and data structures while displaying relevant information such as the parameter types
Can handle threaded applications and switch between different threads to step through or view the state of
Can handle attaching to an already-started process or reading a core dump, in addition to starting the program up in gdb
If such a program does not exist, then I'd like to hear about experiences people have had with programs that meet at least some of the bullet points.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
Edit:
Listing out the possibilities is great, and I'll take what I can get, but it would be even more helpful if you could include in your responses:
(a) Whether or not you've actually used this GUI and if so, what positive/negative feedback you have about it.
(b) If you know, which of the above-mentioned features are/aren't supported
Lists are easy to come by, sites like this are great because you can get an idea of people's personal experiences with applications.
Eclipse CDT will provide an experience comparable to using Visual Studio. I use Eclipse CDT on a daily basis for writing code and debugging local and remote processes.
If you're not familiar with using an Eclipse based IDE, the GUI will take a little getting used to. However, once you get to understand the GUI ideas that are unique to Eclipse (e.g. a perspective), using the tool becomes a nice experience.
The CDT tooling provides a decent C/C++ indexer that allows you to quickly find references to methods in your code base. It also provides a nice macro expansion tool and limited refactoring support.
With regards to support for debugging, CDT is able to do everything in your list with the exception of reading a core dump (it may support this, but I have never tried to use this feature). Also, my experience with debugging code using templates is limited, so I'm not sure what kind of experience CDT will provide in this regard.
For more information about debugging using Eclipse CDT, you may want to check out these guides:
Interfacing with the CDT debugger, Part 2: Accessing gdb with the Eclipse CDT and MI
CDT Debug Tutorial
gdb -tui works okay if you want something GUI-ish, but still character based.
You won't find anything overlaying GDB which can compete with the raw power of the Visual Studio debugger. It's just too powerful, and it's just too well integrated inside the IDE.
For a Linux alternative, try DDD if free software is your thing.
Check out Nemiver C/C++ Debugger. It is easy to install in Ubuntu (Developer Tools/Debugging).
Update: New link.
Qt Creator seems like good stuff. A colleague showed me one way set it up for debugging:
Create a new project, "Import of Makefile-based Project".
Point it to your root project folder (it will index sources under it, and it is impressively fast).
Go to project settings and add a run configuration, then specify the executable you want to debug, and its arguments.
Qt Creator seems to insist on building your project before debugging it. If you don't want that, or don't use make, just go to projects -> build (Left panel), then, on the right panel in "Build Steps", remove all the steps, including the step by default when you created the project.
That may seem like a bit much work for debugging an app I had already compiled, but it is worth it. The debugger shows threads, stacks and local variables in a similar way to Visual Studio and even uses many of the same keyboard shortcuts. It seems to handle templates well, at least std::string and std::map. Attaching to existing processes and core dumps seems to be supported, though I haven't tested it yet.
Keep in mind that I used it for less than and hour now, but I'm impressed so far.
I loathe the idea of Windows development, but the VC++ debugger is among the best I've seen. I haven't found a GUI front end that comes close to the VC one.
GDB is awesome once you really get used to it. Use it in anger enough and you'll become very proficient. I can whiz around a program doing all the things you listed without much effort anymore. It did take a month or so of suffering over a SSH link to a remote server before I was proficient. I'd never go back though.
DDD is really powerful but it was quite buggy. I found it froze up quite often when it got messages from GDB that it didn't grok. It's good because it has a gdb interface window so you can see what's going on and also interact with gdb directly. DDD can't be used on a remote X session in my environment (a real problem, since I'm sitting at a thin client when I do Unix dev) for some reason so it's out for me.
KDevelop followed typical KDE style and exposed EVERYTHING to the user. I also never had any luck debugging non KDevelop programs in KDevelop.
The Gnat Programming Studio (GPS) is actually quite a good front-end to GDB. It doesn't just manage Ada projects, so it's worth trying out if you are in need of a debugger.
You could use Eclipse, but it's pretty heavy weight and a lot of seasoned Unix people I've worked with (me included) don't care much for its interface, which won't just STFU and get out of your way. Eclipse also seems to take up a lot of space and run like a dog.
I use cgdb, simple and usefull
I use DDD a lot, and it's pretty powerful once you learn to use it. One thing I would say is don't use it over X over the WAN because it seems to do a lot of unnecessary screen updates.
Also, if you're not mated to GDB and don't mind ponying up a little cash, then I would try TotalView. It has a bit of a steep learning curve (it could definitely be more intuitive), but it's the best C++ debugger I've ever used on any platform and can be extended to introspect your objects in custom ways (thus allowing you to view an STL list as an actual list of objects, and not a bunch of confusing internal data members, etc.)
I used KDbg (only works under KDE).
Check out the Eclipse CDT project. It is a plugin for Eclipse geared towards C/C++ development and includes a fairly feature rich debugging perspective (that behind the scenes uses GDB). It is available on a wide variety of platforms.
DDD is the GNU frontend for gdb: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/
Similar comfortable to the eclipse gdb frontend is the emacs frontend, tightly tied to the emacs IDE. If you already work with emacs, you will like it:
GDB Emacs Frontend
Qt Creator-on-Linux is certainly on par with Visual Studio-on-Windows for C++ nowadays. I'd even say better on the debugger side.
I've tried a couple of different guis for gdb and have found DDD to be the better of them.
And while I can't comment on other, non-gdb offerings for linux I've used a number of other debuggers on other platforms.
gdb does the majority of the things that you have in your wish list. DDD puts a nicer front on them. For example thread switching is made simpler. Setting breakpoints is as simple as you would expect.
You also get a cli window in case there is something obscure that you want to do.
The one feature of DDD that stands out above any other debugger that I've used is the data "graphing". This allows you to display and arrange structures, objects and memory as draggable boxes. Double clicking a pointer will open up the dereferenced data with visual links back to the parent.
There's one IDE that is missing in this list and which is very efficient (I've used it in many C/C++ projects without any issues): Netbeans.
What can be stepped through is going to be limited by the debugging information that g++ produces, to a large extent. Emacs provides an interface to gdb that lets you control it via the toolbars/menus and display data in separate windows, as well as type gdb commands directly. Eclipse's CDT provides similar tools. I've heard of Anjuta and Code::Blocks but never used them.
As someone familiar with Visual Studio, I've looked at several open source IDE's to replace it, and KDevelop comes the closest IMO to being something that a Visual C++ person can just sit down and start using. When you run the project in debugging mode, it uses gdb but kdevelop pretty much handles the whole thing so that you don't have to know it's gdb; you're just single stepping or assigning watches to variables.
It still isn't as good as the Visual Studio Debugger, unfortunately.
Have you ever taken a look at DS-5 debugger?
There is a paid version which includes a lot of helpful features, but you can also use Community Edition for free (which is also quite useful especially for embedded systems).
I have a positive experience with this tool when debugging Android applications on real device using eclipse.
You don't mention whether you are using Windows or UNIX.
On UNIX systems, KDevelop is good but I use KDbg because it is easy to use and will also work with apps not developed in KDevelop.
Eclipse is good on both platforms.
On Windows, there is a great package called Wascana Desktop Developer which is Eclipse CDT and MinGW all packaged up and preconfigured nicely for the minimum of pain. Its the best thing I've found for developing GNU code on Windows.
I have used all these debuggers and none of them are as good as MS Dev Studio. Eclipse/Wascana is probably the closest but it does have limitations like you cannot step into DLLs and it doesn't do as good a job at examining variables.
The Code:Blocks C++ IDE has a graphical wrapper, with a few of the features you want, but nothing like the power of VS.
VisualGDB is another Visual Studio plugin to develop and debug applications on linux and embedded platforms.
KDevelop works pretty well.
Have you tried gdb -w with cygwin gdb.
It is supossed to have a windows interface which works fairly well.
The only problem I found is that on my present machine it didn't run that way until after I installed ddd. I suspect that it requires tcltk which was installed when I installed ddd.
Latest version of Geany supports it (only on Linux, though)
If you are looking for gdb under Visual Studio, then check WinGDB.
In the last 15 months I use insight (came with FC6). It is not great, it is written in Tcl/Tk, but it is simple and useful. DDD is of similar quality / utility, but somewhat harder to use (various GUI gotchas and omissions). I also tried to integrate gdb with my IDE, SlickEdit. It worked OK (I played some 4 hours with it), but I did not like the GUI context switches. I like my IDE to remain unchanged while I am debugging; on Windows I use SlickEdit for IDE and Visual Studio Debugger for debugging. So from the 3: Insight, DDD and SlickEdit, Insight is my 1st choice, I use it >95% of the time, command-line gdb and DDD make up the other 5%. If I get the chance, I will eval Eclipse at some point, my work PC does not seem to have enough RAM (1GB only) to run Eclipse reasonably well.
I have also heard a lot of praise for TotalView, including 1st hand during a job interview. I obtained an eval for our company in late 2008, but in the end we did not proceed as gdb was good enough for our needs; and it is free and ubiquitous.
Use www.zero-bugs.com/
Zero debugger, it requires C++0x support from gcc
I was searching for a debugger to step through a running programm. Say: Attach. The programm was build with eclipse, but because of maybe some multithreadding obstrucles, no sourcefiles where fond. What ever.
I got very compfortable with NetBeans.
[debug] from menu -> Attach Deugger...
as process chose the one to debug
as project [new project]
Now the window disappars and you see nothing. detach from the process. The Read Square "Stop" helps.
import source from the project as e.g. folder. ".../MyProject/src
Now it appears in your project, and you can set breakpoints.
again ttach debugger
chose the process to debug.
debugger should stop if programm reaches next breakpoint.
Going to [window] -> [Debugging] -> Will your window make compfortable.