Eclipse

Post by **Jonathan** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 12:41 am

Anybody use Eclipse for not-Java? Is Eclipse for not-Java (particularly C++, I suppose) a bad idea, good idea, or great idea for work? I'm wondering whether I should push the powers that be into accelerating their Eclipse exploration or not.

VLSmooth · Post by **VLSmooth** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 12:58 am

The Eclipse C/C++ holy grail is the CDT
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

Unfortunately, I don't know of many who have dabbled with it... yet.

Jason · Post by **Jason** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 1:20 am

I used it for ruby development back in the day. It worked fairly well for that. Not sure about c++.

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 12:05 am

Eclipse is pretty language non-specific in general. The main thing is how good is the plugin written for eclipse for the language. Obviously, they spent a ton of time getting Java to work well. I think CDT is pretty well developed at this point, so I'd try it if I were you, then push it if you like it. It will probably take you a while to get used to Eclipse and figure out where everything is. There are a lot of shortcut keys for stuff and you can set your own too. Because of that, I'm surprised Vinny hasn't tried it out more...

Oh, Borland plugins tend to suck, at least the one we used for doing UML diagrams sucked...

George · Post by **George** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 2:01 am

I've been annoyed trying to use it for C++ development. I'm stuck on workstation with nothing better, and yet I still do as much work in gedit as Eclipse. It's apparently impossible to just view random files in it, so every time I go looking at some system library, I have to launch another editor. It spontaneously rearranges your tabs so you never know where any window is. The file names don't include path information, so if you have ten files named SConscript open (yes, I do regularly), you have to look at each in sequence to try to get the one you want.

In short, it sucks for a novice. Maybe a power user could get something out of it, but I spent all my character points leveling Visual Studio.

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 2:25 am

You might want to take a look at CDT 4.0 RC2.. It seems to be a major update from 3.3 and hopefully they're fixing the silly usability issues you've mentioned. The released version for 4.0 should be out in a few weeks I think.

VLSmooth · Post by **VLSmooth** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 5:56 am

quantus wrote:There are a lot of shortcut keys for stuff and you can set your own too. Because of that, I'm surprised Vinny hasn't tried it out more...

I would if there was a larger group of people using it for non-Java development. It's simply more efficient to learn it with a group.

However, I wouldn't be using it for the shortcut keys, since it's hard to beat a well-configured (x)emacs setup, which I pretty much have.

I'd use it since it actually understands the code (not from a pure text perspective) and is integrated with our revision control and build environment (ongoing effort with official funding).

Edit:
Just FYI, we're starting to switch to Accurev for configuration management and away from CVS. As for build environments, we have a very slick in-house tool (too bad only a few programs use it, for now).

Post by **Jonathan** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 4:37 pm

We're mostly using BitKeeper for source revision control. I'm mostly happy with it. Partially this because we made a dev from Bitkeeper move to Hillsboro, write features for us, and support and admin our repository.

I wish there was a good way to grab just one changeset. Maybe there is and I haven't found it yet.

We're using conscript as a build tool. You can't shoehorn it into as many tasks as make, but for actually building code it's nice.

Post by **Jonathan** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 4:53 pm

Just so you know, we don't have any kind of IDE around here. As a practical matter, everyone uses either emacs or vim.