[haiku-development] Re: New Haiku IDE

First, Caitlin, your Sisong IDE looks very polished (as others already
state) and I'm glad Haiku development toolset get your attention.
I'll try to use it in the next days and report my comments.

Second, regarding the needs or not for some Grand Unified Haiku IDE,
my position is that having several IDE is not an issue in itself, if
any at all.

What could be one issue, though, is the build engines fragmentation. I
really don't like the idea that Haiku open source projects could
becomes in the future
bound to one IDE in order to build it out-of-the-box on Haiku.
Ideally, an Haiku open source software should be build independly of
any specific IDE.
Remember the issue with BeIDE projects files. Closed, undocumented,
binary ones. Not good for versioning project build instruction
changes, forbidden people without access to BeIDE to see these build
instructions to port it to another build engine...
Let's try to avoid this.
I agree with Stephan, what Haiku project could do is provide some
modern build engine "API" good enough for whatever IDEs to build upon.
That will avoid open source softwares for Haiku to fragment on the
build engine requirement, without forbidden developers to choose their
preferred IDE.

Compare Apple's XCode or Microsoft's Visual Studio to the several
build engines used by so many open source projects on Unix/Linux
landscape. Porting efforts are sometimes only build engine ones. When
it's acceptable for foreign platform code, having the same issue on
our own native platform sounds counter-productive.

We don't need a grand unified IDE.
What we do need, IMHO, is a grand unified build engine.
I dunno if it's Haiku project role to provide one.
But I do think that the several IDE authors would do a great move by
unifying their build engines, ideally via an API.

My 0.02 [euro] cent.

Bye,
  Philippe.

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