Re: C++ Programming and Development under Eclipse?
On 2007-11-23 11:09:05 -0800, Ramon F Herrera <ramon@conexus.net> said:
On Nov 23, 1:04 pm, Arne VajhHj <a...@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
I my opinion Eclipse is not nearly as good for C++ as for Java, but ...
Could you elaborate, Arne (or anyone familiar with the environment)?
Are those C++ shortcomings (compared with Java on Eclipse) intrinsic,
i.e., something that cannot be fixed (based on the fact that Eclipse
is written in Java, for instance), or are they a reflection of the
support for Java being much more mature? Should we expect the CDT to
reach some day the same level as the JDT?
It's both.
Part of the problem, as I understand it, is that C and C++ are hard
languages to parse and manipulate. Macros, constructed types (int,
const int, int *, const int *, int *const, const int *const, ...),
typedefs, the exact rules about implicit conversions, templates, and a
few syntactic holdovers from the 70s make it almost impossible to
implement the refactoring and code browsing tools as completely as they
exist for Java. Compiled C is also much harder to work with than Java
..class files, primarily because every platform has a slightly (or not
so slightly) different set of calling conventions, symbol naming
conventions, and binary file formats.
That's not to say it's impossible to write a good IDE for C or C++.
Apple[0], Microsoft[1], and various others have been doing it for ages,
and as Lew noted GNU Emacs makes a very good C "IDE" in combination
with various other GNU utilities. However, each of these tools was
designed for a single environment. A "cross-platform" C IDE is a much,
much harder problem.
-Owen
[0] Who have finally added refactoring tools for Objective-C to XCode:
<http://bast.lionsanctuary.net/~owen/images/refactoring>
[1] Who, for all their faults, have some pretty good code comprehension
and manipulation tools in Visual C++ now, too.