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What Free IDE Do You Use?
postermmxvicom writes "I program only occasionally and mostly for personal interest. I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005! I went looking for other free IDEs and came across Code::Blocks and Visual Studio Express. I work from a Windows machine, use C++, and make mostly console apps; but have written a few Windows apps and D3D or OpenGL apps. I wanted to know what free IDEs you use and recommend. What do you like about them? What features do they lack? What about them irritate you (and what do you do to work around these annoyances)? For instance, when I used Visual C++ 6.0 in college, there was an error in getline that had to be fixed, and the code indenting in DevC++ needed to be tweaked to suit my liking."
Not free, and also no longer sold for Windows, but it's my favorite IDE of all time. I still use CW9 on Windows for anything that doesn't require absolute latest C++ compiler/libs (mainly, my MUD, which I do my dev on Windows, but run it on a Linux server).
CodeWarrior has a feature no other current Windows-based IDE has - independent free floating edit windows without being locked into an MDI container with grey backdrop. I'd gladly pay a few hundred dollars for a modern, actively supported editor that had such a feature (I hear SlickEdit has been planning it, but they have yet to deliver).
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
Geany http://www.geany.org/ is small, fast, and has the basic features I need. It has syntax highlighting for everything from Assembly to Latex, Java, C, C++, HTML, you name it. And (very important) it stays the hell out of my face and just lets me do the job. I love it.
I was a vim guy for a long time. I used it for everything from scripting, to full on applications, and even website development.
Then I bought my mac and discovered XCode. It blew my mind. If I ever go back to linux I will be finding myself a good IDE.
Speaking of which XCode + Interface Builder + applescript makes some of the most powerful graphical applications that any idiot could write. It's really quite amazing how easy stupid it can be. Of course real apps on a mac require ruby, python, or Obj-C.
To answer the question: Visual C++ Express is the one. Lightweight IDE, best compiler, most standards compliant, best debugger ... it's a free download so don't waste time looking at anything else.
Lightweight IDE - it may only be a 3MB installer, but it downloads a lot more to install on the fly and it can chew up plenty of resources for any non-trivial code bases. It often stalls out updating Intellisense on a project of any appreciable size. Part of the reason it's a smaller install is all the help and docs are online which makes doing work without an active internet connection a PIA (i.e. laptop on an airplane).
best compiler - Nope. Not even close. Intel compiler is generally 10-20% faster code than MSVC++.
most standards compliant - I don't even know how to answer this other than to say I'm hoping you are joking. MSVC++ doesn't even handle empty-struct inheritance according to the C++ standards. Oh, and how about variables defined in a for-statement leaking out of their scope? For an idea of just how non-standards compliant MSVC++ is, take a look at the Boost source code and then check out how much of the code is actually work-arounds for bugs / non-standard features in MSVC++. Both GCC and Intel compilers come much closer to the C++ standard than MSVC++.
best debugger - You got me there. Visual Studio (Express) does have a pretty well polished and easy-to-use debugger. I guess I can give you one out of four.