4 ms·

I find this post highly questionable. What is so hairy about C++ for an IDE exactly? It's strongly typed and yes, if you do too much C style stuff it may be a b

by keefe 18y ago

I find this post highly questionable. What is so hairy about C++ for an IDE exactly? It's strongly typed and yes, if you do too much C style stuff it may be a bit harder to navigate but if you stay in a clean OO world it should be very, very similar to Java. Microsoft put out a competent C++ IDE well over a decade ago and Borland has done so as well... It's my personal opinion that IDEs are in general superior to text editors because this integration reduces the cognitive load of solving particular programming problems. People that say eclipse doesn't have a good text editor are being a bit ridiculous - out of the box it is not that great, but there are many 3rd party editor plugins, you could configure shortcut keys however you want and of course extend eclipse... now I am somewhat biased in that I work daily on an eclipse RCP project, so I am already spun up on extending eclipse. This all has me curious though, I'll spin up eclipse C++ development against my thesis code the next (likely imaginary) opportunity I have time to kill...

hfinucane 18y ago
To write a good C++ IDE, you need to deal with macros, C++'s obscene syntax (There are what- four complete C++ parsers?), and you need to parse all sorts of Makefiles, or else no existing projects will work.
- keefe 18y ago
  I'd expect some games that had to be played with release engineering. If the code is properly modularized, this could be two separate processes where you develop your module with mock data and then deploy it into production. Is the opinion really that all the current IDEs suck - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/default.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/default.aspx , http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ , http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/ http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/ , http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html and all the 2nd tier as well? Maybe I am too deep into Java and eclipse, but it seems there are genuine advantages to using IDEs and C++ is similar enough to java that at least for some subset, such a tool could be created. If not, that certainly seems like a market...
  - hfinucane 18y ago
    C++ does look similar to Java, but it's really not. Preprocessor magic + template magic + linking magic means pain. I will admit to not having tried devc++ or visualc. I would imagine that visualc might be able to solve the problem, since they can control the build system, and can hook into their compiler directly (last I checked, GCC made this very hard). I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that you may be overestimating the pain points other people experience /not/ using an IDE.
    - keefe 18y ago
      I haven't done professional work in C++ only my thesis project which was relatively self contained and simple, so maybe I am underestimating the importance of preprocessor/template/linking magic. There is certainly a rather large barrier to entry for vim/emacs for the average developer.
    - keefe 18y ago
      I decided to put up a poll about this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574697 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574697 maybe enough people will answer to be interesting?

by keefe 18y ago

hfinucane 18y ago

To write a good C++ IDE, you need to deal with macros, C++'s obscene syntax (There are what- four complete C++ parsers?), and you need to parse all sorts of Makefiles, or else no existing projects will work.

keefe 18y ago
I'd expect some games that had to be played with release engineering. If the code is properly modularized, this could be two separate processes where you develop your module with mock data and then deploy it into production. Is the opinion really that all the current IDEs suck - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/default.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/default.aspx , http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ , http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/ http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/ , http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html and all the 2nd tier as well? Maybe I am too deep into Java and eclipse, but it seems there are genuine advantages to using IDEs and C++ is similar enough to java that at least for some subset, such a tool could be created. If not, that certainly seems like a market...
- hfinucane 18y ago
  C++ does look similar to Java, but it's really not. Preprocessor magic + template magic + linking magic means pain. I will admit to not having tried devc++ or visualc. I would imagine that visualc might be able to solve the problem, since they can control the build system, and can hook into their compiler directly (last I checked, GCC made this very hard). I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that you may be overestimating the pain points other people experience /not/ using an IDE.
  - keefe 18y ago
    I haven't done professional work in C++ only my thesis project which was relatively self contained and simple, so maybe I am underestimating the importance of preprocessor/template/linking magic. There is certainly a rather large barrier to entry for vim/emacs for the average developer.
  - keefe 18y ago
    I decided to put up a poll about this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574697 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574697 maybe enough people will answer to be interesting?