[Sussex] Re: Magazines and developer questions etc.

[Geoff Teale]

Hi Mike,

On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 12:02 +0000, Mike Diack wrote:
<random snippage follows>
> (By the way, if you've not
> used it, can I commend to you Gimpel Software's PCLint/Flexelint - 
> absolutely brilliant software and worth every penny).
> Splint is also very good but won't handle C++ :( (but is at least free in 
> all senses being GPL'ed).


I use splint heavily for C work.. otherwise I tend to rely mainly on
GCC/G++ output. I've seen and liked PCLint but I didn't like it enough
to make it worth the money IMHO - perhaps I'm just tight ;-)

> Under Win32 I've had the joy of MFC (not half 
> as bad as everyone makes out), ATL/COM (a god awful mess!) and WTL (See the 
> Sourceforge page, which I actually think is a surprisingly good effort to 
> build on ATL).


;-)

MFC is notorious so I needn't argue the point.  Even with the advantages
C++ brings I'd take working with C on POSIX/Xlib over VCC and MFC any
day ;-)

BTW, Have you done much with Qt?  If you're developing on Linux with C++
I think you'll find Qt3, fltk or WXWidgets more comfortable than
straight Xlib or Gtk.  Gtk can be a frustrating excercise for people
who've used more mature toolkits.  The end results are often nicest with
Gtk, but getting their can hurt.

Obviously Qt has retrictions on commercial use that you need to be aware
of.

> Now my question:
> I've done a bit of work under Linux with gcc, make and gdb, but can you 
> offer advice about a good IDE (preferably not emacs) etc to bring it
> all together and give me some of the niceness that I enjoy with the IDE of 
> VS6?
> I tried KDevelop 3 a while back and was quite impressed - any other 
> thoughts/recommendations?

Well, ignoring entirely what you've said I'd say learn emacs properly
and it will serve you in all of your needs far more fully than any other
IDE out there.  It's not a five minute learning curve, but once you have
it your set for life.  IDE's are really overrated, their worst effect is
hiding details from you.  Before doing anything with an IDE you should
make sure that you have a strong handle on the following:

gcc / g++
gdb
make
GNU Autotools (Autoconf, Automake, LibTool, texinfo)
ar / ranlib

If you're having trouble with any of these mail me back and I'll point
you to a really good free book that some GNU people put together for
using the GNU development environment.

Then I'd glue them all together with emacs.  

However, if you really want to live in IDE land Failing that I'd take
the following steps.  

1. Investiagte DDD as an alternative to just using gdb at the command
line.  It's not an IDE, but it is a really good debugger.

2. If you like Qt go back to Kdevelop - it's the most mature of the
IDE's I've seen with native toolkits - Anjuta for Gtk is OK, but
ultimately more trouble than it is worth.

2. For anything else look at Eclipse.  It's about as full featured as
any IDE out there - you'll have to get the plugins for the language /
features you want to use (though this is increasingly easy to do) but
once that's done you should be able to do just about anything you want
to inside it.  The likes of IBM and QNX already ship Eclipse as their
IDE for thier commercial development offerings (WebSphere and Momentics
respectively).

... the only reason I don't use Eclipse is that compared to Emacs I find
it slow, lacking in basic text editing functions and too hard to
customise/extend.  In all of these respects Eclipse is far better off
than visual studio so you should be fine.

3. If you're into .NET have a look at MonoDevelop.  It's pretty cool for
a small project.

-- 
Geoff Teale <gteale at cmedltd.com>
Cmed Technology