4 ms·

In my experience "IDE lockin" is terrible to work with in the long run. After 5+ years trying to compile old Visual Studio or Eclipse projects is a horrible exp

In my experience "IDE lockin" is terrible to work with in the long run. After 5+ years trying to compile old Visual Studio or Eclipse projects is a horrible experience.

HexDecOctBin 4y ago
Sure, I agree, though not anymore horrible than dealing with Autotools. Shitty developer tooling is a different question (and a very important one that I trying to solve), but I am simply talking about being unaware of the simplest features because of one's ideological blinders.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
And I have quite the feeling it will be identical to compiling one of these "package managed" projects whose dependencies are expressed as Github URLs.
jiggawatts 4y ago
Mine is the opposite. Visual Studio makes it a breeze to pick up some random person’s work, often after decades of time if the projects can be upgraded. Even if not… I recently installed Visual Studio 2015 in a VM to build an old project and it was perfectly fine. Can it show smiley emoji in string literals? No, but it does a lot more for me as a programmer than a text editor!
- josephg 4y ago
  This isn’t my experience of running old VC++ projects. They usually end up with some weird linker errors because they embed a hardcoded DLL or something which was compiled with an old version of visual studio or something. You get a lot better at fixing these errors with experience, but I’ve lost count of the number of hours I’ve lost noodling with this stuff to compile some old code. Speaking of progress, I adore this improvement in modern languages. C#, Swift, Rust and nodejs all have officially defined project configuration alongside the source code. I expect to be able to “cargo run” any of my rust programs in 50 years from now just as easily as I can today.
  - HexDecOctBin 4y ago
    50 years from now, "Swift, Rust and nodejs" might not exist. For that sort of time period, you either need a language whose compiler & runtime is easy to write (C, Forth, Scheme, etc.) or a language that compiles to standardised bytecode (C#, Java, etc.).
    - josephg 4y ago
      Why wouldn’t they exist?
      - HexDecOctBin 4y ago
        Because things die.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    That's not an issue with "Visual Studio as an IDE", but "Microsoft's C++ build toolchain" combined with specific issues with C++ the language itself, such as: not having a stable ABI, no truly common stdlib, no package manager, and weird linker conflicts due to the way headers interact with static values. This is the primary reason I've abandoned C++ programming in general, and I'm never going back. From what I can see, the alternative C++ toolchains from other vendors (and open source) aren't fundamentally better. They might paper over one or two issues, but rarely solve the core problem in a permanent way. These days I do only C# and Rust for the same reason you mentioned -- sane project, dependency, and build management.
    - chaosite 4y ago
      But the whole argument is toolchain integrated with an IDE (the I, remember?)
      - jiggawatts 4y ago
        C++ toolchains in general are broken with or without IDEs. It doesn't matter if you're compiling from the command-line or a GUI, it's a trash fire either way. This problem is sometimes temporarily "fixed" by some approach, but the problem is fundamentally with C++ itself, making many basic things night impossible to solve. Eventually the new "simple" toolchain is adapted to support every possible scenario, and then madness creeps back in and we're back to square one. For example, I recently had to compile Chromium from scratch. It has a custom build system (of course), that is more complex by itself than all of the code that I have written in my entire life put together. It was written to "simplify" its builds. That's... crazy. I vividly remember the day I snapped and gave up C++. I was trying to compile previously working code and it was complaining that "__malloc" was undefined. This was a linker error with no further information. It didn't identify the source of the problem, and provided no clue on how to fix it. After hours of effort I simply gave up, switched over to C#, and never looked back. PS: A part of the reason C/C++ developers don't "get" why IDEs are so popular is precisely because C and C++ are so hard to write IDEs for! A single header file can mean different things in the same project depending on where and how it is included. Simply providing tab-complete and inline help is a monumental task. So most C++ IDEs are bare bones compared to Java or C#. They do basically nothing for the developer except the basics. PPS: The Rust team are all ex-C++ programmers and made the same mistakes in their language design, making IDEs very challenging to write for Rust. Don't agree? Remind me, how many IDEs are available that can do something as trivial as "extract method" in Rust?
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  Recently I followed someone's instructions to build a small C++ project on Windows and spent like 5 hours trying to get the right clang and the right cmake and the right ninja to invoke each other. The worst issue involved seemed to be that if you install "MSVC build tools" then cmake will auto-detect that somehow and call the ninja installed by that instead of the one in your PATH, which will pass windows-style flags to the clang in your path which does not know what those are. "Install MSVC to get required dependences but do not install MSVC build tools to avoid anti-required anti-dependencies" was not in the instructions, of course.
  - oblio 4y ago
    You're going outside the beaten path with cmake and ninja. Op is probably talking about Microsoft compilers and build tools.
    - anonymoushn 4y ago
      What is the Microsoft-approved way of configuring a project to be able to build on Linux and Windows?
      - oblio 4y ago
        It's Microsoft. There is no one "Microsoft-approved" way of building GUI applications for Windows (or anything else for that matter), and you're asking for cross platform stuff :-)) The grandparent's comment was pointing out that if you take the default VS setup, which is usually MSBuild, it's quite self contained. As long as you have the corresponding VS redist, you can pretty much pick up an old VS project (one created with VS) and build it. I'm taking even about stuff from 20 years ago. Cross platform projects use cross platform stuff, which are obviously not developed by Microsoft, so caveat emptor. By your logic because VS integrates with npm, the issues setting up npm projects are their problem :-p

In my experience "IDE lockin" is terrible to work with in the long run. After 5+ years trying to compile old Visual Studio or Eclipse projects is a horrible experience.

HexDecOctBin 4y ago

Sure, I agree, though not anymore horrible than dealing with Autotools. Shitty developer tooling is a different question (and a very important one that I trying to solve), but I am simply talking about being unaware of the simplest features because of one's ideological blinders.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

And I have quite the feeling it will be identical to compiling one of these "package managed" projects whose dependencies are expressed as Github URLs.

jiggawatts 4y ago

Mine is the opposite. Visual Studio makes it a breeze to pick up some random person’s work, often after decades of time if the projects can be upgraded. Even if not… I recently installed Visual Studio 2015 in a VM to build an old project and it was perfectly fine. Can it show smiley emoji in string literals? No, but it does a lot more for me as a programmer than a text editor!

josephg 4y ago
This isn’t my experience of running old VC++ projects. They usually end up with some weird linker errors because they embed a hardcoded DLL or something which was compiled with an old version of visual studio or something. You get a lot better at fixing these errors with experience, but I’ve lost count of the number of hours I’ve lost noodling with this stuff to compile some old code. Speaking of progress, I adore this improvement in modern languages. C#, Swift, Rust and nodejs all have officially defined project configuration alongside the source code. I expect to be able to “cargo run” any of my rust programs in 50 years from now just as easily as I can today.
- HexDecOctBin 4y ago
  50 years from now, "Swift, Rust and nodejs" might not exist. For that sort of time period, you either need a language whose compiler & runtime is easy to write (C, Forth, Scheme, etc.) or a language that compiles to standardised bytecode (C#, Java, etc.).
  - josephg 4y ago
    Why wouldn’t they exist?
    - HexDecOctBin 4y ago
      Because things die.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  That's not an issue with "Visual Studio as an IDE", but "Microsoft's C++ build toolchain" combined with specific issues with C++ the language itself, such as: not having a stable ABI, no truly common stdlib, no package manager, and weird linker conflicts due to the way headers interact with static values. This is the primary reason I've abandoned C++ programming in general, and I'm never going back. From what I can see, the alternative C++ toolchains from other vendors (and open source) aren't fundamentally better. They might paper over one or two issues, but rarely solve the core problem in a permanent way. These days I do only C# and Rust for the same reason you mentioned -- sane project, dependency, and build management.
  - chaosite 4y ago
    But the whole argument is toolchain integrated with an IDE (the I, remember?)
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      C++ toolchains in general are broken with or without IDEs. It doesn't matter if you're compiling from the command-line or a GUI, it's a trash fire either way. This problem is sometimes temporarily "fixed" by some approach, but the problem is fundamentally with C++ itself, making many basic things night impossible to solve. Eventually the new "simple" toolchain is adapted to support every possible scenario, and then madness creeps back in and we're back to square one. For example, I recently had to compile Chromium from scratch. It has a custom build system (of course), that is more complex by itself than all of the code that I have written in my entire life put together. It was written to "simplify" its builds. That's... crazy. I vividly remember the day I snapped and gave up C++. I was trying to compile previously working code and it was complaining that "__malloc" was undefined. This was a linker error with no further information. It didn't identify the source of the problem, and provided no clue on how to fix it. After hours of effort I simply gave up, switched over to C#, and never looked back. PS: A part of the reason C/C++ developers don't "get" why IDEs are so popular is precisely because C and C++ are so hard to write IDEs for! A single header file can mean different things in the same project depending on where and how it is included. Simply providing tab-complete and inline help is a monumental task. So most C++ IDEs are bare bones compared to Java or C#. They do basically nothing for the developer except the basics. PPS: The Rust team are all ex-C++ programmers and made the same mistakes in their language design, making IDEs very challenging to write for Rust. Don't agree? Remind me, how many IDEs are available that can do something as trivial as "extract method" in Rust?
anonymoushn 4y ago
Recently I followed someone's instructions to build a small C++ project on Windows and spent like 5 hours trying to get the right clang and the right cmake and the right ninja to invoke each other. The worst issue involved seemed to be that if you install "MSVC build tools" then cmake will auto-detect that somehow and call the ninja installed by that instead of the one in your PATH, which will pass windows-style flags to the clang in your path which does not know what those are. "Install MSVC to get required dependences but do not install MSVC build tools to avoid anti-required anti-dependencies" was not in the instructions, of course.
- oblio 4y ago
  You're going outside the beaten path with cmake and ninja. Op is probably talking about Microsoft compilers and build tools.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    What is the Microsoft-approved way of configuring a project to be able to build on Linux and Windows?
    - oblio 4y ago
      It's Microsoft. There is no one "Microsoft-approved" way of building GUI applications for Windows (or anything else for that matter), and you're asking for cross platform stuff :-)) The grandparent's comment was pointing out that if you take the default VS setup, which is usually MSBuild, it's quite self contained. As long as you have the corresponding VS redist, you can pretty much pick up an old VS project (one created with VS) and build it. I'm taking even about stuff from 20 years ago. Cross platform projects use cross platform stuff, which are obviously not developed by Microsoft, so caveat emptor. By your logic because VS integrates with npm, the issues setting up npm projects are their problem :-p