FOSDEM Interviews On Free Development Tools 102
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"
C++ autocomplete... (Score:4, Interesting)
New IDE (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no remotely decent Open Source completion (Score:3, Interesting)
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;
};
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.
Re:C++ autocomplete... (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, VAssist correctly understands smart pointers, template parameters, partial template specialization and functors. No other tool can do it (yes, I did look at VIM and emacs).
Re:C++ autocomplete... (Score:5, Interesting)
About smart editors (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:C++ autocomplete... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes you can if you a) set up Vim properly and b) use ctags and TList whenever you can.
Beacause Visual Assist is aware of the syntax of C/C++/VB/C#... and acts accordingly.
Check.
For example, it can diffrentiate between local can globalr variables.
Check.
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.
Check.
So you can't simulate it with just a hand made syntax file, as suggestion lists and spell checker are project dependant.
ctags and Tlist are set up to be automatic on my copy of vim.
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.
I don't really need this since typing is faster than taking one hand off and using the mouse to find a suggestion. Besides, I prefer predictable behaviour rather than intelligent guesses behind the scenes.
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.
Vim by default looks at the names of local vars, include files and namespaces so if you've used ctrl-n to complete something you know it's correct. I haven't misspelled a function name since I started using it.
All in all, Visutal Assist is in a whole different class than VIM.
Correct - Visual Assist is a plugin for Visual Studio and vim is a powerful extensible text editor. Seriously, vim is phenomenally powerful - especially at doing all the things you seem to think it's deficient at. You can move around code like lightning (by far the most common action of any programming), jump to and from function, class and macro definitions with a single key, and with plugins like TList and integrated debuggers, it becomes a very fine IDE as well.
Re:I would love to see a good C++ refactoring tool (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [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.
Hello.. Eclise, Netbeans!! (Score:3, Interesting)