can someone be kind enough to direct me to emacs tutorials for large C++ project using gdb as debugger, the project does contain make file.
I did search for emacs tutorials but some are too advanced for beginners and some only target one single file tutorial. I did read the previous posts too but did not find an answer suitable for large projects. Also I am not used to using 'git', one of the answers in previous posts.
Actually, learning Emacs is a thing that just can't be easy. You'll have to learn the basics before you will be able to read "advanced" tutorials.
The first thing you should do is to work through the builtin tutorial (C-h t). It's really good.
Then you should try to familiarize yourself with Emacs configuration basics. The easy way suggested by many users is to get a ready-for-use configuration (such as Emacs Starter Kit) and try to understand it and then tailor to your own needs and preferences. The advantages of using a ready-made configuration kit are:
It's a working code useful for learning the basics of Elisp. This learning path is way faster than reading Elisp manuals and gathering configuration code one small piece at a time.
It demonstrates a lot of useful Emacs features which otherwise might require you long time (sometimes years) to discover.
It offers a framework which you can base on writing your own configuration.
Still you should undoubtedly get rid of whatever parts of configuration you don't need.
Then (or along with the previous step) read some tutorial about using Emacs as a development platform. You can easily find a lot of tutorials via "emacs for [c] development" queries to Google. Here is one of many.
Then install Cedet (Alex Ott has written a great tutorial about it) and start feeling the power.
After that you'll know what to do next.
By the way, there is a great collection of Emacs resources maintained by Bozhidar Batsov.
Start simple. Launch Emacs without any customisations and start editing your source files. The only "tutorial" you'll need to do basic editing is the inbuilt one you'll get by hitting Control H followed by t (Referred to as C-h t in Emacs speak).
Compiling can be done by typing M-x (Alt x) compile and hitting enter. It will prompt you for the compile command which is by default make. Change it to whatever suits you.
Running gdb is done using M-x gdb and hitting enter. The interface is similar to the M-x make.
Don't use things like the Emacs starter kit which makes assumptions on your behalf. While useful as a starting point for newbies, it suppresses curiosity and that's the key to learning Emacs. The above things should be enough for you to start. Once you hit problems and are not satisfied with the ways of doing things, you can search for resources and things. Emacs is not an "IDE" and so you won't have the tight integration which many custom editors have. Don't expect it.
Sorry for the long post, but this forum always asks for use cases :-).
I am frequently called upon to write utility applications (GUI and command line) for my organization. I most commonly write these in Java and more recently Scala.
The "philosophy" in Clojure (and other Lisps) seems to center around the REPL, and I have to agree that it makes a nice development environment, but I obviously cannot produce utilities that require that the users "Install Clojure and Clojure-contrib, then unzip the utility into a directory on your hard drive, start Clojure from the command line using the following classpath, ...". The users do not care that the utility is written in Clojure. They just want to point and click or, at most, type "java -jar Utility.jar -?" on the command line.
My question centers around compilation and separating the application into many namespaces/files.
I know that the main method must be in a Clojure file that includes the (gen-class...) command (or the :gen-class clause on the ns command). Do I do the same for the additional Clojure files, or should they be left as a source code that is packed in the JAR and loaded by the main file? How about testing the additional files from the REPL during development?
I have been using leiningen, cake, and maven to build self-contained JARs (containing unpacked clojure.jar, clojure-contrib.jar, and commons-cli.jar files), but so far I have been writing my code in the same file as the main method.
It's up to you whether you AOT-compile your .clj into .class or let Clojure do it dynamically at runtime. In general, I find it's easier during development to avoid AOT and just use AOT as a performance booster for cases where the cost of compiling your .clj on the fly doesn't make sense (limited environments like Google App Engine or utilities where startup time is critical). For server processes that will run for a long time, there is not much advantage in AOT-compiling.
There are a number of complexities around using AOT classes at dev times that are specific to different dev environments.
One down-side of AOT is that your compiled classes might be incompatible with a future version of Clojure and that is more likely than your clj files being incompatible. That may become more important over time.
When it comes to the separation, I'd keep them in separate namespaces/files:
One for the :gen-class namespace, containing -main and all the other Java-like things.
The other namespace for all the functions.
Ideally, your main should contain just the call to a function from the other namespace, or perhaps some logics for evaluating or repacking of the args.
Your question seems quite similar to the separation between logics code and ui code. You could see the namespace with :gen-class as just an interface provided by your program to Java code, nothing more.
When it comes to the utilities (like command-line, or Swing apps, etc.), there's a trouble with Java in general because of the JVM start time.
Now, you could solve this by making a server app run the REPL in the background all the time, and say, somehow receive an s-expr to be evaluated, and return the result. This could be done as a simple web application which receives an s-expr as URL parameter, and returns the result. Now, with this you could make all utilities in plain old Java, or even bash using wget, since all you'd have to do is access an URL (assuming that server with repl is running in background).
There's a good chance that something like this already exists, so if anyone knows - comments are more than welcome.
Oh, and another thing, the port where repl webapp is exposed would probably have to be closed to the outside world, to prevent Clojure-injections :D
does anyone know of a good profiling tool or library for Clojure?
I would prefer something that could be used from the REPL, along the lines of (with-profiling ...) in Allegro Common Lisp back in the day.
Is there anything along those lines?
Or do you have any experience with (non-commercial) Java profilers that work well with Clojure?
I found VisualVM (see here and here) to be very convenient. Its use with Clojure has been described about a year ago in this blog post; as far as I can see, it's not outdated in any way.
Note that the GUI from which one starts the VisualVM profiler has a prominent text area where one can enter classes / packages to be excluded from profiling -- I find the results rather more useful when clojure.* is on that list.
There's a newish Clojure library which offers profiling: https://github.com/ptaoussanis/timbre
Just found profile in Clojure contrib.
It doesn't work for large amounts of code (it blew up with OutOfMemoryError on a Project Euler solution which VisualVM handled just fine) and it requires you to insert profiling calls in the functions you want to profile.
Still, it's a better alternative to VisualVM in the cases where you just want to profile a couple of functions.
Quick heads-up that I've deprecated Timbre's profiling for a new dedicated Clojure + ClojureScript profiling lib at https://github.com/ptaoussanis/tufte.
That's basically a refinement of the stuff from Timbre, plus dedicated docs.
The README includes a comparison with JVM tools like VisualVM, YourKit, etc.
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.