[Sussex] Re: Magazines and developer questions etc.

[Mike Diack]

Good stuff Geoff....

Just to respond:

RE: Microsoft stuff....

Like I say, personally I think MFC isn't as bad as made out (though it's 
internals are UGH).
ATL and COM on the other hand are truly horrendous to use and are so poorly 
documented - goodness only knows why they ever became popular.
(Thank your lucky stars if you've not had to deal with them - and don't even 
start me on the buggy wonder that is DCOM - I can bore you for hours
with obscure bugs in that if desired! ;))
WTL I actually do like though and am really quite impressed with.
I am a great disliker of .Net (for much the same reasons I've never bought 
into the COM hype, in spite of having to be a COM developer!), so not 
interested in Mono.

Qt does indeed interest me as does WxWidgets (I've seen their work in 
videolan's vlc).

Thanks for all of the comments - please give me a pointer to the free book 
that you mentioned on GNU development.

Cheers for all of the advice, comments and friendly banter, but please do 
pass on the GNU development book link.

By the way, hopefully, one day I'll make it to one of the meetings!

Mike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Geoff Teale" <gteale at cmedltd.com>
To: "LUG email list for the Sussex Counties" <sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 12:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Sussex] Re: Magazines and developer questions etc.


> 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
>
>
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