3 ms·

And they are, indeed, very impressive. But the nature of the language makes their task extremely difficult, and in my experience they aren't reliable. Besides

And they are, indeed, very impressive. But the nature of the language makes their task extremely difficult, and in my experience they aren't reliable. Besides the issue of C++ being just hard to compile (global symbol mutation via the macro system, the way templates instantiate, the compilation unit as the fundamental element of compilation meaning any individual compilation unit can require hundreds to thousands of include files as input), the language is rife with undefined behavior and assistive tooling is allowed to crash on undefined behavior. So, yes, if your tooling crashes it may indicate a problem with your code---but how are you going to find it now that your tooling has crashed? We've had a couple of initiatives at my organization to try and get tooling operational across the code base. They haven't stuck. Developers keep having to fall back to grep and pray. I prefer working with languages where there are simply fewer features and less undefined behavior. It makes the tooling more reliable.

pjmlp 3y ago
From other comments, it doesn't seem the organisation is willing to adopt the right tools, naturally one gets what one doesn't pay for.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Indeed, although I don't know what we could throw money at that would fix the problem of "Clangd crashes trying to provide LSP services for this codebase." We could buy Visual Studio and roll the dice and hope that it's more robust than vscode, but I have no particular reason to believe it would be. This organization has its work to do. My advice to other teams starting out is "C++ may be cheap in terms of hiring people and libraries that exist, but consider the cost once your codebase gets large. This is not a language that lends itself to safe behavior or tool-comprehensibility, and if that's something your project needs, be prepared for that. Other languages are safer, other languages are simpler for tooling to digest."

pjmlp 3y ago

From other comments, it doesn't seem the organisation is willing to adopt the right tools, naturally one gets what one doesn't pay for.

shadowgovt 3y ago
Indeed, although I don't know what we could throw money at that would fix the problem of "Clangd crashes trying to provide LSP services for this codebase." We could buy Visual Studio and roll the dice and hope that it's more robust than vscode, but I have no particular reason to believe it would be. This organization has its work to do. My advice to other teams starting out is "C++ may be cheap in terms of hiring people and libraries that exist, but consider the cost once your codebase gets large. This is not a language that lends itself to safe behavior or tool-comprehensibility, and if that's something your project needs, be prepared for that. Other languages are safer, other languages are simpler for tooling to digest."