As we start the discussion about CDT and e4 on the cdt-dev list, I just want to make sure people are clear when I make statements that appear anti-e4 that I'm not anti-e4. If you like e4 and you want to use it in your project, go for it. There's some really cool things there and the guys are doing a great job of pulling it together.
But I have other important problems to solve higher up the stack than I see e4 trying to solve. In CDT-land, our biggest issue is getting people to even use Eclipse who are using emacs or vi and gdb just fine and who struggle adapting to the world of IDEs. We need to focus on enhancing the value of Eclipse and simplifying adoption to make it more appealing for these people to buy into our wares.
At the top of our list are some workflow issues and the flexible resources work that started in e4 but moved in to 3.x is a start on that. I think we still need some work on build to support multiple build configurations per project, and for build to work just as it does from the command-line. And the launch UI is over complicated for what our users need. But those things are all the platform stuff we really need. And we do have people trying to make contributions in those areas.
And, we have some things to work out in our own kitchen. We need to fix up the CDT build system so that vendors aren't so frustrated by it that they end up writing their own. Then there's the world of debug and systems analysis where I think we really need some innovative UI approaches. As starters, I don't think you can visualize a massive multi-core system using a 2 dimensional UI that assumes a single context. I'd love to see something like Clutter in SWT.
So while the world is rushing towards HTML5 and the cloud, that's great and everything, but we still have a lot of work to do to make Eclipse a great IDE on the engineer's desktop.
You aren't alone Doug. I'm very much aligned with these sentiments. I know that the cloud is coming and having that kind of extensibility for our Storyboard products is interesting ... but at the moment I know we have lots of room to improve the development experience for the unplugged user.
ReplyDeleteThomas
www.cranksoftware.com
Hi Doug,
ReplyDeleteI've been looking at CDT as a platform to parse C/CPP files outside of Eclipse. However, looking at the amount of documentation and a few posts, it looks like this isn't easy. I would like to know how the parser treats errors in files. For e.g., if the type T's definition has not been seen before, does parsing "vector" throw an error?
Thanks,
Namasthe Doug,
ReplyDeleteWhy is subclipse not working with CDT 7.0????
Many other plugins dont work with CDT 7.0...
I am switching back ....:(
The javadoc feature ALT+SHIFT+J simply refuses to work in CDT....
ReplyDeletePLEASE PLEASE have a look at it and enable this....Please...
Sorry to hear that. You can always raise bugs and give details on your set up. We have no other reports of problems like that so please make sure you've installed everything correctly.
ReplyDeleteNew features get done and bugs get fixed when people contribute them. And if you have feedback, don't put it in comments in old blog entries. No one will see them.
ReplyDeleteTo true, I have just tried to switch to Eclipse and CDT from Emacs gdb and I am frustrated. I cant even work out how to simply do
ReplyDeleteb myFunctionName
According to the FAQ I can still type at the GDB Console but with dire consequences. Other than that I am left to dig though my files, load it, find the function set the breakpoint... Now I may be missing something here but if there is a way to do a function based breakpoint in the IDE I have failed to find it and this itself is a problem.
I just re-read my post and I think it comes over more negative than it should. Don't get me wrong, I love eclipse and think everyone has done a great job. The point I am trying to make above is that I agree 100% with you blog post eclipse CDT is currently targeted more to the Visual Studio crowd not the Emacs gdb crowd.
ReplyDeleteThat said if you have a hint on where to find the dialog is to manually set a break point I would love to have the information :)
I've been using Eclipse for Java development for a long time and am very happy with it.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to promote it within my group which has many C++ developers. Do you know of any lists, screencasts, etc. that showcase the top 10 CDT features? I need some easy evangelism I can point people to.