FOSDEM Interviews On Free Development Tools

FOSDEM writes "The Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting folks, aka FOSDEM, have just released the second part of their speakers' interviews. These interviews are dedicated to their development tools track, with Andreas Zeller for ddd, Benoit Minisini for Gambas and Alexander Dymo & Harald Fernengel for kdevelop. Previous interviews were already discussed on Slashdot here"

Comments

C++ autocomplete...

[Cyberax]

When will we see C++ autocomplete support in free tools at least equal to Visual Assist?

Re:C++ autocomplete...

[WARM3CH]

Guess you've never seen Visual Assist. No, you can't do MOST of what it does by simply using VIM. First, Visual Assist is not a text editor, it is a plugin for an already very good programmer's editor: Visual Studio. But it goes far beyound normal syntax highlighting. Why? Beacause Visual Assist is aware of the syntax of C/C++/VB/C#... and acts accordingly. For example, it can diffrentiate between local can globalr variables. The functions you have in your code and the functions you have used from other libraries. When you use it with existing libraries with source (like Boost for example), it will parse the whole thing and now Suggestion lists and spell checker will be aware of the new functions, methods and classes. So you can't simulate it with just a hand made syntax file, as suggestion lists and spell checker are project dependant. It also learns from the patterns you use more often in your code and sorts the suggestions in a way that the probability that you'd need to scroll down the list of the suggestions becomes lower and lower. Spell-checker nows the name of the local variables, included functions and namespaces so even before running the compiler, you know that you have not miss-spelled that function call. All in all, Visutal Assist is in a whole different class than VIM.

New IDE

[should_be_linear]

Really neat free C/C++ IDE for both Linux and Windows is Ultimate++ http://upp.sourceforge.net/ [SF]. It also includes framework for developing cross platform GUI. On windows it supports mingw and free (well "free") MS C++ Toolkit and native MS debugger. Nice part is that you can have single workbench with projects where you can switch toolchains (mingw/MS).

About smart editors

[aCapitalist]

I've been programming on Linux professionally since 1997 when we saw the writing on the wall for OS/2.

Now I love vim, but mostly because of its keybindings and not because I think it's really a great program. It and Emacs are terminal programs at their heart, no matter what kind of guis you slap on the front-end.

I've always like IDEs. I don't care about any false machoness about only using Vi or Emacs in the Unix world. You, as a developer, are a user too and the computer should be there to do the mundane stuff that you shouldn't be doing manually anyway. Just think if you didn't have ctags or etags and had to manually grep through source to find stuff. A pain in the ass.

Now something like Visual Slickedit is nice because it can do refactoring and actually understands C++, but will cost you about $300 or more. That's fine for us commercial developers, but maybe not for the hobbyist. KDevelop 3.x, after the long rewrite, has finally got a somewhat functional C++ parser for it, but you have to bring in most of KDE to use it. Eclipse has a C++ parser, but then you have a dependancy on java and it's not so lightweight.

My point is, if GCC was modularized then we might have had a lightweight editor/IDE that had a deep understanding of C++ to do cool stuff like Visual Assist does. Just look at what Eclipse or IDEA does for Java developers.

I want to express my design in source and would rather have the development environment do some of the drudgery, menial work for me.

Things have improved in recent years, but I still think that windows has a leg up on the number and quality of development tools.

I now await the "ed is the only editor a real programmer needs" responses.