[interfacekit] Re: What makes a good IDE?

I was using BC 4 & 5 only a few months ago on a project for a small 
company - Personally, I found them reasonable, but rather bug ridden. 
 Currently, I'm working for a bank near Liverpool, and I'm writing C++ 
for unix machines - the most sophisticated tool I have there is vi, and 
no debugger whatsoever.

About makefiles, they can do everything you could ever want, but are so 
complex and misunderstood that I've never seen a project that used them 
correctly.  For Windows development you're stuck with Visual C++, the 
compiler's poor, but the IDE is serviceable.  Mind you, from what I can 
gather about Visual Studio.NET, it'll be broken for a few years to come ;-)

Personally for large-scale development, I think you're stuck with 
vi-gcc-make, since they're the only tools available on all platforms, 
unless anyone knows of anything better

                Keith

Erik Jakowatz wrote:

>Have you ever used Borland C++ 5.x?  Not C++ Builder; the older line of
>products.  This, in my mind, represents (minus a few editing gew-gaws)
>the pinnacle of non-RAD IDEs.  The *only* thing I didn't like about the
>environment was the binary project file.  This was well before using XML
>for everything under the sun was the hep thing to do, so I can hardly
>blame them. =)
>
>In all honesty, it's been so long since I used BeIDE that I can't
>remember the catalog of stuff I disliked about it.  What I do know is
>that almost immediately after starting to code for BeOS, I moved to
>using Eddie and makefiles (which I do *not* care for).  Not long after
>that, Be started providing their whole makefile-engine thing and I moved
>to that.
>
>I also use CodeWarrior for PalmOS *daily*.  While the environment is a
>big improvement over the BeIDE version of CodeWarrior, project
>management can be a real pain in the rear.  It nevers gets to be *too*
>bad, simply because Palm projects are by nature small.  Using the tool
>to manage something as big as Deco (my main BeOS project prior to
>OpenBeOS, which happens to be a development environment) would be
>completely out of the question -- the project manager just doesn't have
>what it takes.  And Deco is small compared to what we're doing (a
>thought which frightens me).
>
>In short, BeIDE is fine for managing small to medium projects (ignoring
>any other complaints I might have about it, but can't recall), but
>totally out of its depth on anything large scale.
>
>To answer the question posed by the subject, a good IDE should provide a
>great editor (which is a lengthy subject all its own) and a project
>manager which is capable of handling large scale projects which are
>composed of numerous sub-projects which are quite large in and of
>themselves.  It should be simple to navigate the entire source tree of
>your project in a hierarchical manner, which (in most cases) is going to
>reflect the directory structure on disk.  Changing options for the
>top-level project, sub-projects and individual files should be simple
>and intuitive.  When you want to tweak some obscure, low-level attribute
>of a single file, it should be easy to find the appropriate dialog,
>without having it in your face at all times.  Tabbed dialogs are great
>for a lot of things, but I've seen a lot of users get confused by them
>in IDEs.  Sometimes it's just better to have an "Advanced" button which
>brings up the next level of propeller-headed goodness. =)
>
>So, really, BeIDE falls down for me on both of these counts.  I don't
>like the editor -- the highlighting is pathetically simplified and there
>aren't enough "goodies" which make editting easier -- and the project
>manager is really *weak* (which is the part that is important for us). 
>If an IDE hasn't got those things covered right, pretty much anything
>else it does really doesn't matter.  I seriously loved the tabbed editor
>in C++Builder, but the wimpy project manager (inherited from Delphi,
>where apparently no one does any large scale development) just drove me
>nuts!  I always felt that if Borland dropped the BC5 project manager
>into C++Builder, no one in their right mind would use anything else to
>develop for Windows.
>
>Rant, rant, rant. =P
>
>e
>
>DarkWyrm wrote:
>
>>I remember a while a ago our discussion about JAM, make, BeIDE, and so forth,
>>and I was wondering what makes BeIDE so bad that we don't want to use it. Not
>>that I don't support what we're doing - I just was curious.
>>
>>--DW
>>
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