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KDevelop review
A reader writes "Joe Barr has written a very interesting review of KDevelop. KDevelop seems to be a strong contender for folks looking for a C or C++ IDE environment under Linux.
" We're going to be reviewing this as well, along with other IDEs - but you can check out our current review of Cygnus Solutions' Code Fusion for Linux.
When Code Fusion came out, I posted a question asking people about other IDEs available for Linux. After searching for myself for a few hours, I came up with several that weren't mentioned. In fact, I downloaded all the IDE's I could in order to evaluate them.
I found that Code Warrior and one other IDE had no evaluation versions, but I looked through all the rest.
Code Crusader was the basic vanilla-box editor which has none of the advanced features I was looking for. However, it was also the easiest to use and is probably a good starting point.
The second one I tried was KDevelop. The interface was very easy to use, but there were several things that bothered me about the program itself. One was that the integration was not complete. In order to develop C++ programs, it was necessary to edit command line arguments. Althought the docs were helpful, this type of tweaking should be unnecessary in an IDE. The other problem was that KDevelop kept crashing at random intervals with a Segmentation Fault. I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, or even if it was my fault, but I didn't experience any problems of this type with the other six or seven IDE's that I installed.
Code Fusion I believe was one of the IDEs that had no evaluation version.
Of all the IDE's that I reviewed, I found that several were missing important feature sets.
Take for example SlickEdit. This was IMNSHO, the best C++ editor available for Linux. The interface was intuitive, the code-complete features were especially dazzling, and the class browser was first-rate. However, SlickEdit lacks Multi-User functionality, and there is no integrated debugging. The debugger can be linked in of course, but there is no way to make the multi-user portion work. Although SlickEdit interfaces with several IDEs on other platforms, it does no such thing with any of the other Linux IDEs. I was very excited about this product and was disappointed to learn from their tech-support department that there was no way to get the type of integration I needed for multi-user support. Oh well, maybe next release.
Sniff+ was next on my list. To tell everyone the truth, I never even got around to installing it the first time. The download page was the most annoying I have ever seen. I hate it when companies ask for such extraneous information as postal code etc.. Just to get an evaluation version. Ok back to the topic at hand..
Sniff+ was simply exasperating and the installation was a hassle. I know that many people use this product successfully, but I had to make a fast decision about the choice of IDEs and after looking at the ugly custom interface that Sniff+ provides, and the lack of a real-time color coding tool, I decided Sniff+ was not for me.
The next product on my list was C-Forge. Initially, I did not like this product. I found it very hard to make even a simple hello world program. There was no help available within the program, as documentation is only available online. The program advertises that it has complete abstraction of the make tool. Well, this is all very nice, but it only serves to complicate matters. For example, the tutorial that shows how to create a hello world program fails to mention that for some reason C-Forge will ignore any #include statements in the code. Maybe I didn't have my libraries set up right or something, but there was no #include statement at all in the tutorial, and even I know that this is necessary to access printf() or cout.. My Linux installation used all the defaults, so there is no excuse for why the program should not work right away.
These faults are however temporary, and are not an underlying problem. The multi-user support of this package is immediately obvious as it requires a TCP port on which to run the server-side portion of itself. It has complete integration with RCS, and the way it handles everything is superfluous. The editor is very nice in that it will actually auto-tab to the correct space for code-beatification etc.. Of course, some people may find this annoying, but it can be turned off.
The function and class browsers are first-rate, and supposedly, there is a code-complete feature that I haven't gotten around to figuring out. The program itself is pre-setup for interfacing with the debugging tool DDD, which I have not yet had a chance to use.
This IDE had everything I needed, with a decent interface to boot. Although I was set on SlickEdit, this program simply has more of the functionality that I need. In the end, this was the IDE that I decided on, and it will be the one I use in the future. The support options look great. Included in the $150 price tag is a free upgrade to version 2.0 which is due out later this year.. For a little bit of additional money, the makers of C-Forge will send out quarterly updates on CD.
There were several other IDE's that I reviewed (I went through all the ones I could find, in total maybe 8 or 9 of them), but none of them were of any note.
One German one, of which I can't remember the name initially looked good, but I found such a simple fault in it, that I lost all confidence in the product. Simply put, the code-colorizer was crap. I had a class called "fooclass" and even though the "class" was part of the variable name, it was still highlighted as if it was a keyword.
In the end, c-forge was the right product for me. Even though the documentation is lacking, and the program has a steeper learning curve, it does not have any fundamental flaws that would keep me from working with this product successfully.