Best IDE platform: Eclipse?

[gamaron]

Summary
---------

[The latest in my series of "Best C++ development resource" questions...]

I'm looking for a C++ IDE. If I'm going to learn something, I prefer it
to be free-of-charge (preferably and open-source base), extensible (read:
language independent, plug-in capable, etc), and platform independent. A
broad community of support would be nice, too.

I'm having trouble finding anything that even comes close to Eclipse in
this regard.

Can anyone offer any other suggestions or corroborations?

More Details
-------------

Eclipse's "universal" approach and extensibility seems unsurpassed. There
seem to be so many Eclipse plugins that it's making my head spin.

For example, I want Subversion integration. Sure enough, the Subversion
folks have an Eclipse plugin: http://subclipse.tigris.org/ . Where else
could I even have prayer of getting such extensibility in the world of
"everything is CVS?"

I really only have 2 other IDEs on my radar screen:
* http://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp/
* One of the Borland IDEs (a business part of mine uses it, but he's not
married to it--I have yet to check it out).

I have not looked much farther, but would like to see a reference to a
bunch of other links. Eclipse looks so good right now that it's hard to
find motivation to try anything else; HOWEVER, I have yet to significantly
use Eclipse, but the Eclipse-platform-and-CDT (the C++ development tool
plugin) installation was extremely slick.

I'm an ex-C++ programmer/designer that has come back to "the fold" after a
long hiatus doing non-programming work (program management, sales,
marketing, etc).

(Disclaimer: I realize it's difficult to label something as "best."
Often a solutions choice might heavily depend on the problem to solve and
the problem's associated "environment"--be it technical, political,
personal preference, etc. However, I use the word "best" here mostly to
be concise...and to spark some feedback. ;)

Thanks for any help!
-Matt

[gamaron]

I forgot to include this reference:

http://www.eclipse.org/

-Matt

[Phoenix Fyrestar]

Have you tried KDevelop? It seems to fulfill all of your requirements, it's
free/open source, (not sure how easy it would be to get to run on mac or
windows, but you should be fine if your using *nix), and
supports:Ada,C,C++,SQL,Fortan,Haskell,Java,Pascal, Perl,PHP,Python,Ruby and
bash shell scripting. The GUI is fairly consistant, and it integrates well
with Qt designer if you are going to be doing any GUI programming.

If your using Mac OS X, then try Project Builder, it's not open source, but
it's a free download from apple if you don't already have it installed. It
doesn't support as many languages, just: C++, ObjectiveC and Java, but it's
a pretty nice IDE.

Of course, at the end of the day, I still prefer vim, which is just a text
editor, but with some scripting you can make it very productive. It
includes syntax highlighting for just about ever language you can think of,
and it can really make editing code fast and painless*.

*once you learn how to use it well, before then it's more painful than a
death of a thousand papercuts.
gamaron wrote:

Summary
---------

[The latest in my series of "Best C++ development resource" questions...]

I'm looking for a C++ IDE. If I'm going to learn something, I prefer it
to be free-of-charge (preferably and open-source base), extensible (read:
language independent, plug-in capable, etc), and platform independent. A
broad community of support would be nice, too.

I'm having trouble finding anything that even comes close to Eclipse in
this regard.

Can anyone offer any other suggestions or corroborations?

More Details
-------------

Eclipse's "universal" approach and extensibility seems unsurpassed. There
seem to be so many Eclipse plugins that it's making my head spin.

For example, I want Subversion integration. Sure enough, the Subversion
folks have an Eclipse plugin: http://subclipse.tigris.org/ . Where else
could I even have prayer of getting such extensibility in the world of
"everything is CVS?"

I really only have 2 other IDEs on my radar screen:
* http://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp/
* One of the Borland IDEs (a business part of mine uses it, but he's not
married to it--I have yet to check it out).

I have not looked much farther, but would like to see a reference to a
bunch of other links. Eclipse looks so good right now that it's hard to
find motivation to try anything else; HOWEVER, I have yet to significantly
use Eclipse, but the Eclipse-platform-and-CDT (the C++ development tool
plugin) installation was extremely slick.

I'm an ex-C++ programmer/designer that has come back to "the fold" after a
long hiatus doing non-programming work (program management, sales,
marketing, etc).

(Disclaimer: I realize it's difficult to label something as "best."
Often a solutions choice might heavily depend on the problem to solve and
the problem's associated "environment"--be it technical, political,
personal preference, etc. However, I use the word "best" here mostly to
be concise...and to spark some feedback. ;)

Thanks for any help!
-Matt

[Steven T. Hatton]

Phoenix Fyrestar wrote:

Have you tried KDevelop? It seems to fulfill all of your requirements,
it's free/open source, (not sure how easy it would be to get to run on mac
or
windows, but you should be fine if your using *nix), and
supports:Ada,C,C++,SQL,Fortan,Haskell,Java,Pascal, Perl,PHP,Python,Ruby and
bash shell scripting. The GUI is fairly consistant, and it integrates
well with Qt designer if you are going to be doing any GUI programming.
<OT>
I personally find the designer approach best for creating scratch code. It
will spin up code that provides the layout you specify, and will also
connect some signals and slots, but I find it more natural to write my UI
in C++ rather than having it generated for me in XML.

But there are also advantages to the XML approach... KDevelop needs a lot of
work. It provides a lot of good features, but some of them are very hard
to figure out. It also lacks support for a lot of things in C++. For
example, it does not provide an automated way of creating skeletons for
pure virtual interfaces, nor templates.
</OT>

Of course, at the end of the day, I still prefer vim, which is just a
text
editor, but with some scripting you can make it very productive. It
includes syntax highlighting for just about ever language you can think
of, and it can really make editing code fast and painless*.

*once you learn how to use it well, before then it's more painful than a
death of a thousand papercuts.

Not to mention (X)Emacs. Emacs has excellent support for many programming
languages. With the same qualifications as you note for vi(m).

--
"If our hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more
particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus
mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we
are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." - Bertrand
Russell

[Brian Riis]

gamaron wrote:

Summary ---------

[The latest in my series of "Best C++ development resource"
questions...]

I'm looking for a C++ IDE. If I'm going to learn something, I prefer
it to be free-of-charge (preferably and open-source base), extensible
(read: language independent, plug-in capable, etc), and platform
independent. A broad community of support would be nice, too.

I'm having trouble finding anything that even comes close to Eclipse
in this regard.

Can anyone offer any other suggestions or corroborations?

More Details -------------

Eclipse's "universal" approach and extensibility seems unsurpassed.
There seem to be so many Eclipse plugins that it's making my head
spin.

For example, I want Subversion integration. Sure enough, the
Subversion folks have an Eclipse plugin: http://subclipse.tigris.org/
. Where else could I even have prayer of getting such extensibility
in the world of "everything is CVS?"

I really only have 2 other IDEs on my radar screen: *
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp/ * One of the Borland IDEs (a
business part of mine uses it, but he's not married to it--I have yet
to check it out).

I have not looked much farther, but would like to see a reference to
a bunch of other links. Eclipse looks so good right now that it's
hard to find motivation to try anything else; HOWEVER, I have yet to
significantly use Eclipse, but the Eclipse-platform-and-CDT (the C++
development tool plugin) installation was extremely slick.
[snip]
Thanks for any help! -Matt

Someone's likely gonna hate me for this, but... hey, you asked!

I don't actually use an IDE anymore, having been unable to find one that
fulfilled the requirements I had, *and* was free. (If not necessarily
open source.) Eclipse was my best shot for a while, but I must admit
that I abandoned it.

Ok.. so, what *do* I use?

The editor is called Vim. It is open source, and has a world of plugins
and scripts at the community site. Also it comes precompiled for a wide
host of platforms, including various *nices and MSW. Vim is extremely
powerful, but has a steep learning curve. (Vim just doesn't behave like
most other editors!)

For a build system, I use SCons. It is written in Python, and the
"makefiles" are actually Python scripts. This does *not* mean that you
have to learn Python to use it, as the few things you need are explained
in the manual. It also has an active support mailing list. Of course,
this means you'll need Python (version 1.5.2 or higher) installed as well.

And, since you've been probing in other threads as well, I'll just
mention that I use Doxygen for source documentation, wxWidgets for
cross-platform GUIs, and Boost for everything else. :)

Take it or leave it... Cheers!

--
/Brian Riis