C++ Looking for a functioning IDE for C++

Crivens said:
+1 for kdevelop.
There is also devel/codelite and devel/codeblocks which I had uses over the years.
Click to expand...

There is also Ultimate++ but the woe of these is reliance on internal or 'simple' GUI libraries that tend to not look well on high resolution high DPI displays. I've already been disproven in my generalizations but where I come from, developers tend to use at least two big screens.

Kdevelop is Qt/KDE so will always 'scale' with the graphics stack well.

I also fear those tools would not be able to resolve huge CMake projects that KDevelop does fine.

Btw. does anyone remember Bloodshed Dev-C++? Easy, batteries included IDE for windows, even had a package manager.
 
Zare said:
developers tend to use at least two big screens.
Click to expand...
This is a great point. I run a laptop connected to a 4K monitor. I end up running juci++ on the laptop display with everything else on the 4K monitor because the font is too small in 4K. The font size can be increased but so far I just drag the window to the smaller monitor out of laziness.
 
I'm in a mood for a morning rant and eclipse makes a good target. As much as I've tried over the years to embrace eclipse/cdt for c/c++ development over the years I just end up getting angry and needing high velocity projectile range therapy. My problems with it are

1) it's always been buggy as hell. I cannot tell you how many times I've had to recreate projects because their obfuscated JAVAesque project metadata got corrupted. Updates to the core IDE often break a well working feature at the expense of fixing something different. This leads to a flip flop of ongoing bugs that never seem to get totally fixed.

2) Have you ever actually tried to get good technical help from the eclipse foundation? The question is rhetorical. Their support venues suck to the nth degree. I used to participate in the eclipse forums and then they migrated away from the forums and onto github discussions. I washed my hands of any contact with them at that point.

3) Too many semiconductor manufacturers became enamored with eclipse and use it as the "workflow environment" for their products. STmicro comes to mind as an example. The problem is that it continues to be buggy, which means producing code for the products becomes a major hassle...and I've never enjoyed working in environments that force a specific workflow, but instead prefer to have a bunch of atomic tools that I can mix and match to meet my needs. Many times I've used the STmicro STCube environment in an out-of-order fashion and broke many days work by corrupting a project and I cannot easily recover because of eclipse's hiding and obfuscation of project metadata. A big no-no in the STmicro environment...DONT TRY TO RENAME COMPONENTS! refactoring is inviting armagedon. In the end I had to abandon eclipse and only use the STM32CubeMX app to setup the micro-controller I/O and features, then resort to a safe GUI editor to write the main code.

4) I guess there is only so much you can do effectively with JAVA...not that I have anything specific against it. It just covers a part of comp-sci that I avoid...I mean come on now, JAVA is effectively the 21st century replacement for COBOL. Too many times I've evaluated or had to use tools that were written in JAVA and been disappointed by the bloat and amateurish nature of the tools. eclipse does nothing to invalidate my bias in that regard.

So the question is "why is eclipse so bad?" I've got some opinions on that...imagine that, LOL

1) it suffers from project bloat without a clear authoritative mandate and direction. I think most FOSS projects suffer a similar disadvantage and the well run ones are run by professionals who maintain control and direction for the project.

2) As I've already said, it's JAVA based...it suffers an incredible resource bloat problem

3) the plugin nature of eclipse makes it incredibly hard to thoroughly test and validate the interactions between components and I suspect the attitude is the all too common "our users are our testers"

4) It tries to be all things to all people, so fails to do anything well.

Anyway, I'm guessing I've triggered at least one lurker so have at it and rip apart my arguments. LOL
 
Well Kent I have nothing to add to that. It used to be OKish 15 years ago.

elephant said:
This is a great point. I run a laptop connected to a 4K monitor. I end up running juci++ on the laptop display with everything else on the 4K monitor because the font is too small in 4K. The font size can be increased but so far I just drag the window to the smaller monitor out of laziness.
Click to expand...

There is also issue with looking at streams e.g. screen shares, if most people in the team use big desktops.
 
Alain De Vos said:
I liked borland text based gui editor & Delphi.
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I was eyeballs deep into every Borland product they ever sold from the the very beginning.
I remain on Delphi 7 to this day.
It does everything I need, except 64 bit code, which I don't need.

I also use "The Semware Editor" for the last 40 years.
Back in the 80s it was called QEdit for DOS, and worked great.
Today it is TSE and runs great as a Win32 app.
It does block and column operations easily, and handles any size of source material.
For those so inclined, it is extensible by user written macros.

I skipped Delphi after Embarcadero bought it, due to price and a very buggy 64-bit environment.
Today, Embarcadero offers a freebie Delphi version which is SO feature laden and complex, I turned away.
I don't care for the IDE in Visual Studio, either.

I also have Lazarus installed, both 32 and 64 bit versions.
It suffers similar to Embarcadero, in its complexity and level of features.

But it is a freebie, just in case I need 64 bit code, but will have to tweak my huge library to be Lazarus compatible.
No thanks, at least for now.

I couldn't imagine working today with a single screen.

I don't need a fancy swing set with gold plated poles and mink lined seats.
A simple rope and tire do just fine, and is very stable.
 
bgavin Since we're talking about Windows development for a moment ...

In between writing code in Turbo C and MFC, I was knee deep in Delphi / Object Pascal. At that time, Borland's tools - which were made to compete with Microsoft's Visual Basic - were better quality. Somewhere around the time VC5 MS's C++ tooling became usable is when I stopped seeing gigs asking for Delphi experience. I never saw much demand for Borland's OWL. I eventually dropped MFC in favor of ATL/WTL before demand for .NET took over.

Microsoft has been moving to a subscription model for everything. I don't mind a one-time payment for something but "renting" software that runs on my own hardware makes no sense to me.

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Click to expand...

No thank you.
 
kpedersen said:
I think Embarcadero tried to revive that a number of years back.
Click to expand...

Didn't Embarcadero buy Borland's compiler range?
The late 00 versions of Borland's C++ Builder brought Linux support into the libraries. I remember Kylix being the name for the Linux version - googled it now, and yup Embarcadero bought that.

Dev-C++ was a light, freeware stuff. It had the same level of UI as 16-bit Windows Borland/Microsoft suites.
 
Yes, Embarcadero bought out Borland.
After many, many iterations, I understand the current 64-bit Delphi is free of the elemental bugs.

I recently grabbed their freebie offering and found it the same as Lazarus: too many moving parts.
So I stick with Delphi 7 and remain a happy coder.
I'm retired, so I write for private clients and my own amazement.
 
elephant said:
In between writing code in Turbo C and MFC, I was knee deep in Delphi / Object Pascal. At that time, Borland's tools - which were made to compete with Microsoft's Visual Basic - were better quality.
Click to expand...

Ha, I haven't seen your post before mentioning the Borland tools above.
I've used C++ Builder extensively throughout the 00s, as I come from C background.
I've always wondered why Microsoft did not equip VC++ with a true WYSIWYG form editor alike Visual Basic, yet Borland did it.

The tools are now moving away from form designs to HTML based, reactive frontend stuff. Like Qt QML.
What I don't like about it - the form design is a domain in itself, requiring expertise and all the rest of it. But anyone can draw out a simple fixed-width form, or work with basic resizable layouts. The point of these tools is to aid a programmer in designing a form. The new stuff doesn't have that. You need to get yourself deep into HTML/JS alike shit to be able to wrap your mind on how a simple hello world with a button form works.

Not to mention, the new design patterns yield quite functional but very bland, ugly designs.
 
Zare said:
Didn't Embarcadero buy Borland's compiler range?
Click to expand...
Yeah. Borland sold to CodeGear and then Embarcadero bought that if I recall.

Since C++Builder 6, they bloated it up considerably though. (Actually C++Builder 5 was the peak in my opinion...)

Borland Kylix was cool in theory but I never quite got it to work. What was quite interesting about it was that the underlying technology was just Wine. It was probably one of the largest commercial softwares using Wine technology at the time.

Zare said:
Dev-C++ was a light, freeware stuff. It had the same level of UI as 16-bit Windows Borland/Microsoft suites.
Click to expand...
Ah, here it is. It is still around, Embarcadero's maintained fork of Dev-C++:

https://www.embarcadero.com/free-tools/dev-cpp
 
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