First Commercial C++ Development Refactoring Tool

swrittenb writes "According to their recent press release, SlickEdit Inc. announced Visual SlickEdit® v9, the first commercially available development tool with C++ refactoring. Although this area has been studied, and non-commercial refactoring tools for C++ exist, how comfortable are people using an automated solution for refactoring with this particular language?"

Comments

We're already comfortable with compilers

[orthogonal]

how comfortable are people using an automated solution for refactoring with this particular language?"

Well, when you consider that a compiler is also "an automated solution for [code] refactoring", I guess anyone using C++ (or any other compiled language) is reasonably conformable.

Since there are no constructors or templates or multi-expression tests ( "if( a && b || c && d )") in any machine's assembly languages, we all trust our compilers to generate assembly language that corresponds to the high-level language constructs we've actually written -- and in the case of the control expression to that "if" statement, we trust the compiler to know and follow the operator precedence for the language being compiled -- and in C and C++, the required "short-circuit" evaluation too.

That said, a good bit of that trust -- for C++ and C -- reposes in rigorous language standards and (more or less, I don't want to argue about language (mis)features or hacks for backward compatibility) well thought-out language designs.

(That's one of the many benefits of a rigorous, documented language standard, by the way -- do you know if, in scripting language "S"( where "S" may be Perl, windows scripting host, visual basic, or what have you), short-circuit evaluation of logical operators takes place, or if there's a sequence point between each one? Not to bash any one language, but for Perl, deja-googling shows sequence points have been an unresolved issue since 1998.)

To the extent that a refactoring tool's design is based on standards and on thoughtful and an open -- not proprietary -- processes that bring in opposing and skeptical views, as do the design of C and C++, I'd be reasonably willing to, in Reagan's words, "trust but verify". But if the refactoring tool is the proprietary product of a closed shop, I'll be far less confident that the Marketing Department didn't;t have too much of a had in product "design".

But however the products comes to be, the proof remains in the use -- let's see how the automatic refactoring compares over several real-life projects before trying to judge.

SlickEdit.

[Spudley]

I've used SlickEdit for a while, and it is a very nice tool (even if we call it SlackEdit at the office). Their Diff tools (DiffZilla, etc) are probably the best I've used anywhere.

I've only had the chance to use it under Windows, but I understand there's Unix and Linux versions available too.

My opinion: If you're going to pay for an editor, this is a good one to pick.

When it comes to refactoring, I can't comment - I've not used this version, so the feature is new to me. It sounds like an interesting feature, but in honesty, I can't see us making much use of it.

Re:We have shit tools

[The Infamous Grimace]

There's no unix version so I guess I won't even try this tool.

Um, in addition to Windows, it supports:

Linux kernel 2.4 and up
AIX 5 and up
HP-UX 11 and up
IRIX 6.5 and up
Solaris SPARC 7 and up

...all of which are UNIX.

(tig)