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FOSDEM Interviews On Free Development Tools

Posted by timothy on from the what-software-wants-to-be dept.

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"

13 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. C++ autocomplete... by Cyberax · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    1. Re:C++ autocomplete... by jokumuu · · Score: 3, Insightful
      In general there is a problem with many of the tools in the world of free software.

      The general problem is that those are usually built by true experts, that is people who know their programming inside out. The tools are built to "scratch a personal itch" thus they are generally very powerfull but not so userfriendly.

    2. Re:C++ autocomplete... by Frymaster · · Score: 4, Informative
      When will we see C++ autocomplete support in free tools at least equal to Visual Assist?

      maybe i'm blowing smoke out my ass (puff puff) but it seems like you can get 80% of that just by using vim. let's look at the feature list from visual assists website:

      • Enhanced Listboxes no
      • Suggestion Lists ctrl p and ctrl n in vim will auto complete and cycle through all the similar options. you can set your dictionary to include a syntax file. the whole skinny on that is here
      • Enhanced Syntax Coloring i don't know how "advanced" the coloring is... but vim certainly allows you to write some pretty "advanced" syntax files
      • Goto well, there's bookmarks in vim. that's similar.
      • Underlining of Misspelled Words there's a swell spellchecker for vim here. it "highlights" mispelled words... which may be as good as "underlining".
      • Auto Recovery. vim does a fine job of recovering (see here) i don't know how "auto" you need it.
      --

      2 1337 4 u!

    3. Re:C++ autocomplete... by jokumuu · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I agree with you on that but maybe you are missing the point atlest a bit.

      Wast majority of people doing any sort of programming in the world are quite frankly not that good. Thus they need easy, preconfigured tools that will help them do the basically simple things they have to do, but that seem so difficult and intimidating to them.

    4. Re:C++ autocomplete... by WARM3CH · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:C++ autocomplete... by kwerle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wast majority of people doing any sort of programming in the world are quite frankly not that good. Thus they need easy, preconfigured tools that will help them do the basically simple things they have to do, but that seem so difficult and intimidating to them.

      What a crock.

      If "having easy, preconfigured tools that will help me do the basically simple thing I need to do" makes someone dumb/lazy/whatever, sign me up.

      I don't want tools that could do something, or that can be tweaked to do something, or that can do something if you add other tools. I want tools that do what I want, right now.

      Saying that those tools nearly exist, or can exist with some work, is saying that the DO NOT exist - only it makes it sound better to some OS folks.

      (lover of jEdit, gnumake, etc)

    6. Re:C++ autocomplete... by Hamfist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Maybe I'm not very good. Maybe that's a result of my job, where 20% of the time is programming and the rest of the time is tons of other stuff that keeps the company running smoothly. I've had to learn like many different programming languages over the years. Powerful autocomplete helps clear the cobwebs. If you mostly program in Java, do you remember your C++? How about javascript /PHP /perl and all of the other web languages, how about all of the associated standard and custom libraries? Sure I can read a man page, or heck, a paper page to remember the arguments; but why should I? Good autocomplete will tell you the function arguments, their types, reference styles and return values as you type. You simply cannot compare this to anything that requires additional keystrokes, window changes, book opening. I know the syntax, I know how to program effectively, but what was the name of that function? Did it take one argument,2 or 20? Modern programming requires access to a lot of information, and autocomplete is one of the best things I've seen. Add to that an annotated class/library browser and wow, holy productivity.

      Being an effective programmer often means picking up new tools. As these new tools inevitably come with reams of new functions / objects etc. Having a powerful editor flattens the learning curve greatly. How much quicker is it to become productive in a New language when you have autocomplete?

      btw: the point of this message is not 'difficult and itimidating', the point is 'getting the job done'. If having imperfect memory means 'frankly not being good', then welcome to the human race, mate.

  2. New IDE by should_be_linear · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

    --
    839*929
  3. There is no remotely decent Open Source completion by njyoder · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You are blowing smoke out of your ass. Unless you've actually used Visual C++ and Visual Assist don't bother commenting.

    That vim auto-completion stuff is *extremely* primitive. It's just autocompletion of keywords basically. VC++/VA have full blown language based auto-completion. That means they actually have a complete parser for the C++ language, which is by no means an easy thing to do. A "syntax file" is just matching regular expressions (a glorified grep) and isn't doing any real parsing of the language. So please, please unless you've used the auto-completion feature don't talk about it.

    The closest thing I've seen is something in emacs and even that sucks balls. Let me give an exmaple. AC will go through all of the source and header files you're using and parse them. Because of this it can auto-complete CODE, not just KEYWORDS.

    EX:

    template
    class A {
    int foo;
    char bar;
    T meowface;
    crap moo;
    }; ...imagine there is a different definition of A that just accepts one template parameter

    int main(void) {
    A[autocomplete kicks in and shows you definition(s) for class A i.e. template A]

    so I start typing A blue;

    then later I can do

    blue. and it shows me the members I can access, their protection, inherented shit blah blah

    return 0;
    }

    Sorry, that's the best I can explain it quickly

    There's also a debugging feature in C++ called something like edit as you go. You can basically edit code WHILE you're debugging and it will recompile it and insert it into the program while it's at a break point. THere are other features too.

    The only other software, commercial or OSS that I've seen do this is Apple's newest development studio thing.

  4. About smart editors by aCapitalist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:I would love to see a good C++ refactoring tool by aCapitalist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm no compiler expert, but it's my understanding that C++ refactoring depends on a deep understanding of the already complex C++ language - more so than say code-completion(intellisense).

    I know that visual slickedit has it (proprietary - somewhat expensive), but i'm not aware of any other editor/IDE that can.

    I know that http://cedet.sourceforge.net/ for emacs can do intellisense type stuff, but not sure about refactoring.

    I wouldn't be surprised to see the Eclipse CDT plugin project get it eventually.

    I was listening to Bram Moolenaar's (vim head honcho) BOF
    talk and he spent about half of it talking about intellisense(code completion), so I think us vim heads might get some of that for vim 7.

  6. SharpDevelop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Check this out... See if it meets your needs:

    http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/

    Works pretty well for me....

  7. Hello.. Eclise, Netbeans!! by ahmetaa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I do not get it.. why there is almost no mention of Eclipse or Netbeans in these articles? why java is the bastrad child of the open source community? is it because people still dont get it? Those IDE's are far beyond C++ counterparts. Even Visual Studio. Or take IDEA. it is free for open source use now and probably the best programmers tool ever desgined.