2005-11-22

Eclipse IDE

I'm trying out eclipse as IDE for C and C++ development. So far, I'm happy. There are several reasons why I've given up on emacs+gdb+xterm combination, in order of importance:
  1. I am tired of manual build management. Make, SCons, whatever, are all equally tedious to set up and use properly. I'm not doing it anymore.

  2. There are other C/C++ IDEs, such as Anjuta2[1]. I did not bother looking into them as I have another reason for trying out Eclipse: to become productive with it. I have a project in mind, the development of which is most easily done in Eclipse. Yes, in the (not-so-)short future, I'm going to program in Java although it sucks big time. What on - it's a secret for now.

  3. emacs is a pain to set up and use properly. Here is a brief example: Many of emacs's key combinations are too verbose for my taste, esp. a feature that I'm frequently using: marks (VI: mx, 'x in command mode). So I'm using viper, the VI emulation mode. However, I didn't manage to convince emacs so that a) viper turns on itself automatically upon emacs startup, and b) sets autoindent mode (:set ai). Everything is set in config files, but it just doesn't have any effect. And I certainly know that it's possible to do accomplish it, as I stumbled upon it before in the past.


Basically, I've gotten tired of wasting time on trivia like makefiles and programming the emacs editor.. Which in the end I never did learn how to program.

So far, I'm happy with eclipse. Although written in Java, it is pretty responsive. It does basic project management for me, has integration with subversion (although, not perfect, there are cases where I have to resort to console..), at last I'm experiencing the benefits of automatic struct field completions on Linux[2] (it's a great help not having to refer to documentation or my own header files to remember how some field is called), etc..

[1] As for Anjuta2, I got discouraged by this web page. Quote: "It currently provides an editor with syntax hilighting and a rudimentary project management system." Doesn't seem worth to try it out. This short summary sounds like emacs/vi + some project management. How did I stubmle upon that page instead of the project's home page? It's the first page listed on google when you search for "anjuta2".

[2] I've done a console program for Win32 as a part-time job. Then I was using Visual Studio.NET, and I'm happy with that IDE too. VS6 is, IMO, crap, but VS.NET.. is an excellent IDE. All that I have been annoyed at in VS6, has been fixed in VS.NET. And added features that really made my life easy. I felt that IDE was actually helping me, as opposed to VS6 where I felt that it fought against me.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How large is the program you're working on?

I tried Eclipse with a larger C++ program, 50k+ lines. The "C/C++" parser was incredibly slow, it took ages to parse the source code, and navigating the source (ctrl+mouse click to reach method definition, etc.) was slow as hell too, requiring a 15-second wait for the most basic of operations. Memory usage was appalling as well.

The whole thing was pretty close to being useless, I'm afraid.

zvrba said...

It's in the range of < 10k lines. Thanks for your comments. What are you currently using for C(++) development?