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I use windows on my dev machine for one reason - visual studio.

• modeless 8y ago
  I recently tried setting up an alternative dev environment on Linux and it takes some work but I think Visual Studio can be matched on Linux now for C++ development. The combination of VSCode, cquery, and clangd can provide code completion and navigation that I think is finally on par with IntelliSense, and it scales to large projects. VSCode's GDB integration is tolerable for debugging. Linux has some definite advantages too. For one thing the filesystem is just blazing fast, which really helps with git. Various other things are faster too, like I'm writing an OpenGL app and creating a GL context is much faster on Linux. Also I've been trying out https://zapcc.com https://zapcc.com which made my builds five times faster, no joke. I'd almost move to Linux for that alone.
  • umanwizard 8y ago
    Just want to second this. Cquery can be finicky to get working, especially if your project involves precompiled headers (I've found that building cquery from source myself and ensuring that it's linked against the same version of libclang as the clang I'm using for compilation helps). But once it's working, cquery is an absolute game changer for C++ development. It feels like a completely different activity than it did before.
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    VS is so much more than just code completion and navigation, even for C++.
    • modeless 8y ago
      Code completion, navigation, and debugging are the only VS features I miss on other platforms. What C++ features are you thinking of?
      • pjmlp 8y ago
        Architecture modelling, unit testing, C++/CLI, C++/CX (now C++/WinRT), MFC/UWP, multi-threading/GPGPU debugging, secure STL, SDL annotations, code maps.
      • criddell 8y ago
        I use the refactoring features quite a bit. The dialog editor is pretty easy to use as well.
  • pknopf 8y ago
    I'd love to see a blog post that gets a fully-featured C++ dev env working in VSCode.