As I've mentioned a few times on this blog and elsewhere, we often get requests for a simpler way to get new users up and running on their Windows machines. This is especially true for students and hobbyist who have a need to learn and play with C++ and don't want to dive into Linux. As well, we get numerous bug reports from people who are trying to go through all the manual steps to set this all up and miss something.
Well, I am pleased to announce "CDT for Windows". This is a distribution of the Eclipse Platform and the CDT with the MinGW GNU tool chain for Windows and a Java Runtime wrapped up in a simple Windows installer. With a few clicks you'll be up and running debugging a C++ application.
The distribution is on SourceForge at http://cdt-windows.sourceforge.net/. It's currently at version 0.9.1 and contains the Europa Platform and CDT 4. My objective is to get it at a 1.0 level by the end of September with CDT 4.0.1. I have also included the SDL portable multi-media library. My hope is to get the wxWidgets portable application library into it as well.
As with the CDT, I really want to build a community around "CDT for Windows", mainly since I'm doing most of the work in my spare time (I've got a lot of work to do at QNX and the CDT too, you know :) and need to share the work, which really hasn't been too much so far. I've only done light testing so feel free to give it a spin, raise any issues you may find in the SourceForge tracker.
I think it looks pretty slick for something that only took me a couple of days to put together. I hope you find it useful as well.
Very nice Doug!
ReplyDeleteA couple of suggestions: It would be nice if GNU make was included in the mingw folder, and also if mingw/bin was added to the PATH evironment variable by the installer.
I've been using Eclipse for over 2 years now and have fallen in love since the beginning.
ReplyDeleteAt some point I wanted to start a project with C++, but I found it very difficult to do with this manual mingw stuff.
The project was put on hold, but now I decided to try again... and when I saw that you have released such a pack - I rushed right away to download it. It is flawless on first sight, so thank you very much, Doug!!
I hope you will be introducing Boost soon (and WxWidgets as I saw in one of your comments).
Hope I can now go back to my favourite Eclipse!
Thank you! Boost is definitely on my plans. I should start capturing a wish list. I'd like this distro to be as complete a C/C++ development enviornment for Windows as I can.
ReplyDeleteDoug, I wrote my first impressions in a post here and would be glad if you have some thoughts on it.
ReplyDelete