What Tools Do FLOSS Developers Need? 310
An anonymous reader writes "I am a free software developer; I maintain one relatively simple project written in C, targeted at end users, but I feel that I could contribute something more to the FLOSS community than my project. Instead of focusing on another project targeted at end users, I thought that I could spend my time working on something FLOSS developers need ('Developers, developers, developers, developers!'). The question is: what more do FLOSS developers need from existing development tools? What would attract new developers to existing FLOSS development tools? Which existing development tools need more attention? I can contribute code in C, Python and bash, but I can also write documentation, do testing and translate to my native language. Any hints?"
Visual Studio replacement on Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Visual Studio is the favorite IDE for lots of programmers and without a doubt still the one thats considered best there is.
However I've started doing some Linux programming along with other languages that could be developed on Linux (PHP, Delphi/Kylix). However the IDE's I've tested dont seem to compare with Visual Studio or even Delphi's IDE. In most cases they're mostly somewhat advanced text editors and building and debugging is more inconvenient. They just dont feel like complete IDE's where you can do your work. Is there such professional suites available on Linux and if not, what could be done to improve the existing IDE's and tools to that level?
Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Eclipse doesn't work for you?
Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, Eclipse is a great example of what's wrong with Open Source software from a usability perspective -- to be reasonably productive with Eclipse, you probably need a bunch of plug-ins, a bunch of time tweaking the preferences, someone who's spent years using it, and probably all of the above. Possibly you also need twice the memory (or more) of just about any other option to run at a reasonable speed for no apparent reason.
I'm interested in coding; I'm not interested in spending a bunch of time fighting my IDE to do it, and when I think about the years I spent using Eclipse, that's basically what I remember. Other people have a different experience with it and I won't say they're wrong, but that's what it was like for me.
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I can try; to be fair, it's now been a while since I've used Eclipse.
I remember things like:
- Needing to choose/install/configure plugins for things I generally consider to be standard IDE features, such as user interface (Swing, etc.) design or decent debugging
- Views switching for no reason I could discern
- Eclipse taking a long time to start up, which is tolerable except that it also crashed a few times a day
- Problems building/deploying, such as the infamous "Eclipse Dance" and
- Generally, spending more
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I'm not a real developer. I'll readily admit that. I'm mostly a Network guy that happens to have written some stuff in C++, C#, VB, pHp, VBscript, Javascript, and Java. In the last four years, I've worked mainly in Windows environments and have been mostly using C++ or C#.
My foray into using eclipse came when I needed to develop an application on an Embedded board my company wanted to use in its project. The boards that were decided on supported only Java so I grabbed Eclipse and went to work on it. I
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Visual Studio's C++ Intellisense gets better with every release (try out the 2010 Express Edition). 2008 in particular made Intellisense faster and more reliable and more user-friendly. It tends to not play nicely with anonymous namespaces, though, so if you use those a lot that could be a problem.
In any case, I've found Visual Studio's Intellisense to be better than (e.g.) NetBeans' equivalent. Purely anecdotal, of course, YMMV.
The debugger is what keeps bringing me back to Visual Studio, at least when
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Eclipse is a fairly good ide, it could use help with C/C++ development tooling.
gdb could stand some love, especially so that it can better be hidden behind a UI.
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Between Redhat's Insight tool and DDD, it's already well hidden behind UIs. Sure they aren't shiny and glossy with anti-aliased type, but they do the exact same job that the VS debugger does with allowing you to step through the code.
In fact, there's nothing special I've seen in Visual Studio's debugging that couldn't be done with DDD.
Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
This must be some new meaning for the word "done" that I have previously been unfamiliar with.
Can you edit and continue when working with C++ or C#?
Making changes on the fly is one of the premium features of Visual Studio and I have never seen it in any other IDE. True I haven't used all of them yet but I've been thru netbeans, eclipse and a few others. The integration of the IDE with the debugger is far more important than the utility of the debugger. I have seen this with python, lua and several interpreted basics but not with C++ or C#.
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While it is an interesting feature, changing code at runtime always seemed suspect to me. I don't know if it's possible at all in Linux, and I know it's not possible in Windows if you're targeting a 64-bit platform.
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Its not so suspect, its just convenient. When you're running your app through the debugger, and find a piece of code that doesn't work, quite like you expected, you can change your current statement position, change the offending code and run through it. Its no more suspect than altering a variable value whilst debugging.
Of course, once you're done you recompile and run through again to make sure.
I think it works by re-compiling and linking your changes at the end of the image, and then adding a jump to the
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Out of curiousity, why do you prefer makefiles over a VS project file?
It's almost certainly true that I never did enough with makefiles to get particularly good with them, but they mostly seemed like a pain in the ass to me -- a side chore to be completed so I could get to actually solving the problem at hand. I'm interested to know what I'm missing.
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gdb could stand some love, especially so that it can better be hidden behind a UI.
THIS.
Except for the second part of that.
I want debugging tools. My personal favorite would be a heap explorer - something that maps a core dump to pointers, so I can map out the entire content of memory in my core dump visually and walk through it sanely. For example - I could look through a core dump and say hey, the buffer overrun that appears to have caused this belongs to this piece of memory - which follows this peice of memory over here which makes me think that my block allocator chewed up stuff it
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s/ in gdb//
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Whenever I see this construct:
I have to ask myself, did the poster think that after quoting and highlighting a particular thing from the original post, we still wouldn't understannd that they thought it was an important part?
Seriously, the "THIS" meme has to die, and I don't care how ugly it gets or how loud it wails, as long as I get to say "I am thankful for its end." Next time, I'm using mod points.
Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux (Score:4, Funny)
This!
Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll take Qt Creator [nokia.com] over Visual Studio for C++ development any day.
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I tried this out for the first time a couple weeks ago (after several years of Visual Studio usage) and was very hopeful...however I left feeling that it wasn't quite finished all the way. I got the impression that it was just a bunch of tools glued together with a rapid-development type GUI framework.
That said, I was quite pleased with it overall. I definitely will strongly consider using it next time I start a project. For my two cents, I think this is a great example of what the author is looking for,
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Qt Creator has very good visual design tools, but the editor is lacking in things like code completion compared to VS. Even more so if you compare latest development versions of both rather than stable releases - VC++2010 can do code completion correctly on the template metaprogramming mess that is Boost.Lambda, for example; the only C++ IDE that can match this, from what I've been told, is KDevelop 4.
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Try an Interface / Project Builder replacement instead:
http://www.gnustep.org/ [gnustep.org]
InterfaceBuilder.app clone:
http://www.gnustep.org/experience/Gorm.html [gnustep.org]
ProjectBuilder.app clone:
http://www.gnustep.org/experience/ProjectCenter.html [gnustep.org]
NeXT used to charge $4,995 / developer seat for such tools --- now one can get them for free (even w/ a Mac, one can get a free on-line membership in the Developer's Connection and download the latest version)
William
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Speaking of which, are there any of the original videos floating around demonstrating building an app using InterfaceBuilder? I seem to recall one where Jobs developed a contact management app from scratch using point and click... but it may not have been Jobs.
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It was Jobs and (IIRC) he was doing a NeXT 4.0 promotional video.
Something more recent which uses the actual GNUStep IB would be nice.
Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
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Code::Blocks is what you are looking for ;). http://www.codeblocks.org/ [codeblocks.org]
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I'm actually an xcode fan. I hated it at first, but now I love it.
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What third party libraries in particular make Intellisense die? I know Boost can sometimes make Intellisense bog down, but my experience is that the only thing that never worked *properly* has been anonymous namespaces. Even pointer accesses on boost::smart_ptr worked right. I worked for a year or so on a million-plus-line-of-code MFC C++ application using VS 2003 and then VS 2005 (before 2008 came out), and I never had a problem with third-party libraries (of which we used several), as long as you let I
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At least if you're doing C++/Qt, then nothing beats Qt Creator... I had hope for KDevelop 4 for a while, but it seems to take forever and meanwhile Qt Creator has fixed most of the things I missed. I haven't done any really big scale development but at least for cranking out smaller tools it's fast and easy with graphic drag & drop ui designer, autocompletion and such that I expect and Qt is near a complete platform with IO, network, databases, xml, whatever. I generally don't have any other deps except
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I'd agree with this statement. I think the closest thing I've found to a slick IDE in Linux is QT Creator, which has their fantastic designer, a great editor, etc. all in one package. Obviously this is only good for certain things. NetBeans is also quite good, and considerably more flexible. At a distant third is eclipse, which is most flexible of all, but terribly clunky.
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Code::Blocks is a good one for Linux, it's not quite Visual Studio but it has most of the same features, the ones you actually use on a regular basis. I haven't tried the Windows version, but I know one exists as well.
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I hear this about VS a lot. As someone who has never used it, let me ask, what is it, specifically, about VS that's so great?
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I do application development for osx. Should I be using visual studio?
I mean, I do application development, so I should have used VS... right?
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I have been doing application development for decades and do not use VS.
It does not support punch cards.
On a more serious note, you have to put in a lot of time with the very complex IDE's in order for them to be truly useful. You can spend many years churning out stuff that runs, but writing code is a small part of development. In the business world maintaining, fixing and enhancing code is the consumer of your time.
A good version control system, testing methodology and deployment methodology is much
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KDevelop 4 is shaping up to be a very good IDE. Probably worth to try out a beta if you're into FLOSS. Does PHP (I hear) and C++ (I know) quite well. A few stupid corner that are not quite there yet, but most of the hard stuff seems to be working.
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I agree with regard to putting GUIs together. Typing the code for placement and properties of your standard widgets by hand is so much more tedious than just dropping them on the form by Drag&Drop. Also, itegrated debuggers are nice. ;-)
But Visual Studio is by no means the only IDE to offer that functionality. Borland Delphi, which was released roughly at the same time, provides the same benefits. So you could as well ask for a Delphi replacement
Fast forward to today:
Visual Studio is admittedly quite go
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Wow, I must be getting old. I still use emacs for all my coding and memory dumps for my debugging. When I started using emacs, the vi guys in the group would mock me for being a wimp.
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Code::Blocks is what you are looking for. http://www.codeblocks.org/ [codeblocks.org]
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Code::blocks is okay but not nearly as comfortable (I use both the Linux and the Windows version).
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I suspect it's more that both hold because of the different mindset that each platform engenders. The Windows command line is mostly crap because the attitude in the Windows world is mostly that it's unimportant, because GUIs can accomplish the same thing. And that attitude leads people to make advanced GUIs.
In other words, it's the same thinking of "we should do this in a GUI" that leads to both situations, not someone sitting down and thinking "I want to write this as a command line tool, but that'll make
hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
A dentists chair and some teeth?
(bad joke i know)
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Cute tushes (butts, rear ends, etc.)?
Code what you know best (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree. If you're going to volunteer code, then program what you need or enjoy.
Documentation [docforge.com] is another area where you can contribute whatever you know best.
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this is the best first advice. but maybe the submitter needs some hints on possible areas :)
one thing that i find missing is a decent manpage editor. several standalone projects have died, so maybe creating one as a plugin for an existing software would be best (maybe export plugin for oo.org or so).
as submitter mentioned documentation and translating, helping out with projects that are meant for documentation writing and localisation is a decent choice - for example, i've heard that pootle web translation
FLOSS developers? (Score:2, Redundant)
Add Emacs Lisp to your skills (Score:4, Funny)
Because we need someone to finally give us proper editor on top of the OS we use.
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Money (Score:2)
Documentation (Score:4, Insightful)
API references aren't enough. Need rational, best practices, meaningful examples and references. Tutorials aren't terribly useful because they are inherently limited to cases that are easily teachable. OpenSSL is a fine specimen; crucial parts of the API are omitted from the current, maintained documentation. These can only be found in the archived SSLeay documentation, and that amounts to a spotty collection of notes.
(yes, I've paid for the books, too)
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Agreed [docforge.com]! We need more contributions to documentation.
Documentation (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest problem with much of OSS is that the documentation is terrible. Try figuring out what the *right* way to do a "poll" type call on Linux is, or how to configure clustering with Geronimo and you will quickly realize that outside of reading the code there is almost NO good documentation on how to do more advanced things with open source software.
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You mean poll(2)? It's not Linux's job to provide free tutorials for programming against the POSIX APIs. That's what you buy "Advanced programming in the Unix environment" for.
If you're referring to the poll(2) man page, don't expect it to be a tutorial. (There is a select_tut(2) man page, but that's a rare exception.)
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I think he means whether to use poll, epoll, select or umm... the other one.
oh yes - kqueue. so which one's the right one to use? Now I've remembered them, I can can google for examples/tutorials/commentary and so forth. Sure, its the user's responsibility to educate himself enough as to which example code he'll find is good and which is poor.... but that's time that could be better spent on the next problem. If the documentation provided such an example itself everyone would be more productive and there'd
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It's not just documentation, it's specifically the "how to do X" kind of documentation, as opposed to reference-style "what function F does". For many FOSS libraries and frameworks out there, the only thing they have is Doxygen-generated class/function reference. Occasionally, you also get a very brief introductory tutorial. The result is that one often has to sift through the list of classes and functions, trying to guess which one is relevant to the task at hand from its name - not a very productive way t
FLOSS (Score:3, Informative)
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This is the first time you have seen FLOSS instead of FOSS? How long have you been here, a week?
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Half the time my mind decodes it as "Free/Lossless Open So--" before screeching to a halt and restarting the acronym reading...
Interoperability among SCMs (Score:4, Insightful)
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> would need to be implemented by all the different SCMs
You could implement a proxy which would translate the commands and answers from one system to the other. You use what ever client you like and connect to the proxy and proxy would connect to the real server.
[client you want to use] --- [proxy] --- [server your project manager wants]
But be prepared to find problems I couldn't think of.
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You can actually use a lot of them against the others repository. E.g, hg works fine against a git repository. So just use git on the server (seems to be the one with most features there) and let people use whatever client they like.
Not that there is any good reason to prefer git except for one thing, which brings me back on subject: We really need a libgit(2). Development has essentially halted on this.
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Git, mercurial, monotone, etc. are all ready nice, and do pretty much the same thing, but it's annoying to have to use the one that the project leader decides on. It would be nice (if it's possible) to be able to pick which one you want to use as a client, and have it work with whatever the project manager wants to use for the upstream repository. I'm not sure what all this would encompass, probably some common distribution (push/pull) protocol would need to be implemented by all the different SCMs..
You can't have a common network protocol because of some fairly fundamental differences (rename tracking, use of crypto, concept of what a "branch" is, etc). What you can do, is have a common minimal-info dump format (for example, there's work to make monotone read/write git-fast-import data) that allows for one-shot, one-way data migration...you could probably extend this to allow for repeated pulls or maybe even bi-directional use, but you'd need code specific to each pair of systems and the people on bot
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I can't help reading that as "Git, mercurial, monotone, etc. are all ready nice, and do pretty much the same thing, but I want to use a different one which I think is much better and which noone actually *working* in the project wants to use". If you think they all do the same thing, why not use the one other's are using?
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The fundamental unit of all SCMs is the changeset. It's possible to convert between the various changeset formats using a tool like Tailor [arstecnica.it]. So you could build a useful prototype of something like this by running incoming and outgoing changesets through that sort of tool to convert to the native format of the server SCM. You can convert them to the native format on the server, so no need to invent a new distribution protocol. People end up building one-offs for this sort of thing out of simple shell scri
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But they're the project leader. They're calling the shots so you use what they specify.
Most projects let you pick your editor, filesystem, distribution, etc. It would be nice to add version control to that list. That doesn't seem like it would be all that hard to do. There are already tools to migrate a repository between different version control systems and they mostly use similar concepts.
Documentation (Score:3, Interesting)
If there is one thing FLOSS regularly needs help with, it's documentation.
I give you OpenSSL: One of the most well known libraries, and the documentation is very lacking. How about some better examples? How do I use PSK? How about a quick start guide?
So many projects have this problem: They have "API documentation" which is nothing but a list of what the individual functions do with no indication how they get used together. Or they document functions but not data structures, etc. So if you really want to help, write documentation.
Easy web-based database form developer (Score:2)
There's enough already, but... (Score:2)
I think we're pretty well covered as far as development tools go. The problem is that a lot of them aren't terribly well polished and the documentation -- if it exists at all -- is often terrible.
Find a project you like but that needs work and help bring it to maturity. Or go looking through the plethora of abandoned projects out there for something that looks promising and bring it back to life.
BOOTSTRAP (Score:2)
I can ... translate to my native language.
Bootstrap... translate docs and error messages for developer tools, so your fellow native developers can work in a native language.
And when you find stuff thats too icky to translate, rewrite and feed it back upstream.
FLOSS? (Score:2)
QtCreator (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I'm a Qt Fanboi, but hear me out:
Qt is free (LGPL), multiplatform (support all users), fill-featured and clean.
QtCreator (new) is the Qt IDE, with tons of support and integrated help, including an integrated gdb (or other) debugger.
If you're on Python, then wait a bit for PySide or get PyQt now.
I feel I can move mountains with just one download the sdk [nokia.com]
A better acronym. (Score:2)
Give me UltraEdit for *nix (Score:2)
I love that tool for my windows editing, if something that replicated its functionality that was as easy to use and learn existed for *nix world...I'd be in heaven.
Yes there are lots of editor tools, but I have yet to find one that works as easily (and intuitively at least for me) as UltraEdit. I have never had to access the help for this tool its that easy, but at the same time hugely powerful!
Clone that! Make it work native in KDE! Yeah that would help immensely.
Static code analysis (Score:2)
A working static analyzer. Clang [llvm.org] is almost there but generates way too much cruft to wade through.
More mature fuzzing tools would be handy too.
Integration (Score:2)
Linux development seems to still be stuck to shell+Vim/Emacs+gdb for many. It's actually kinda interesting, given that decent IDEs have been available for a long time - Eclipse CDT, NetBeans, KDevelop, and recently Qt Creator. Of those, Qt Creator seems to be the easiest to just start using (even more so for people with past Visual Studio experience, as it uses many familiar shortcuts and layout), and also best-integrated - UI designer, debugger, documentation etc. This part is good.
FOSS IDEs also tend to h
SCons (Score:2)
Come help work on SCons! [scons.org]
SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.
It's under active development, and it's the best way to build C, C++, LaTeX, and lots of other types of projects. Build scripts are 1
Good Code Analysis Tools (Score:2)
I'd love to see a static code analysis tool for C/C++ that was as good as FindBugs.
Probably not much (Score:2)
I doubt there's a person alive who can substantially change FLOSS development - the tools have been there for nigh on 40 years. If there's a problem I can almost guarantee that someone would've fixed it already.
I suspect documentation and translation would be the biggest help - if you're looking for "bang for your buck^Wtime", go with this.
If it's code you're looking to contribute, I don't think you (or any one person) can really do anything more than incremental improvements. Don't get me wrong, incrementa
Debugging back in time... (Score:2)
Being able to step backwards through code while debugging would be nice...
Here are some google tech talks / presentations...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpfmKIxusZY [youtube.com]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3897010229726822034# [google.com]
And there's a debugger here (which I should try out sometime...):
http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/debugger.html [lambdacs.com]
Still, I haven't seen this being available with many different platforms.
Data Modelling Tool (Score:2, Insightful)
Ideas from a Mozilla contributor (Score:2)
Pick a large, active open-source project and try to help with the problems its developers have. You will be loved.
Here are some of the problems I'm aware of within the Mozilla project.
Speed of development
'make' doesn't scale. An incremental build, even with no changes, takes at least a minute. (In contrast, just checking whether any files have changed takes 'hg' less than 10 seconds.) Maybe help us move to 'scons', or help improve 'pymake', or just help us get our dependency generation right.
'ld' is slo
Re:Editors and Debuggers (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone that claims they aren't hasn't bothered to use the tools available to them. It's entirely possible to get equivalent context-awareness going in VIM/Emacs, but since they aren't packaged as a whole people write them off as being "obsolete" or somesuch nonsense.
Last I looked KGDB worked quite well, and it behaves in a very similar fashion to Windows when being debugged.
You mean GDB? What "new things" could be added?
Re:Editors and Debuggers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Editors and Debuggers (Score:4, Funny)
I see you are programing a privilege escalation exploit, would you like help with that?
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When you run a
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It's probably not what the GP was talking about, but if somebody improved the support for C++ templates, that would be great. Sometimes it gets lost.
Anyway, it is not as if what a debuger does changed on those 30 years. What is happening is that there is a generation of developers afraid to use the command line, as amusing as it may sound. May I add that I doubt about the competence of those ones that are afraid of the command line, but they are cheap, somet
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For sure I can imagine a few things:
Yeah, GDB can do a lot. But GDB alone is not enough for efficient debugging.
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Anyone that claims either vi or emacs is a useful editor hasn't used a modern Windows IDE.
Anyone that claims Visual Studio is a useful IDE hasn't used Emacs SLIME :)
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SLIME does not hold a candle to VS sorry.
I can think of plenty of features that SLIME has, but VS does not. However, I can't think of any feature in VS that is not matched by either Emacs itself, SLIME or some other extension.
Could you explain why you think VS is better?
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Anyone that claims Visual Studio is a useful IDE hasn't used Emacs SLIME :)
Props to that!
Dont be all up in my Vim (Score:2)
Now I'm not sure how I would do that in a "modern IDE" but I'm not convinced that it's missing either.. Ive just burned too many neurons to quit vim..
Storm
:wq
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he wasn't trying to compile, just bring up the intellisense parameter list :)
demands != suggestions (Score:3, Insightful)
People who whine and bitch, saying things like "FOSS will never take off if it doesn't conform to me and only me" is why developers say fork it or fuck off. You're not contributing anything, you're just being a nuisance.
Developers get all sorts of random demands from petulant users. If we patiently explained to each and every one of them why their suggestion either isn't a priority (or even would be detrimental to the project) we wouldn't be developers because that would take up all our time.
You won't get a
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As a developer: if I'm not being paid and my pet project isn't being helped along by someone willing/able to code, write documentation, etc... why should I care again?
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Foss never takes off? How about:
Your TV
Your DVB reciever?
The internet that you are on, with your supscription to you ISP servers that probably run FOSS?
How about the global economy? The servers that are keeping trading alive, may they not be run by FOSS for the majority of them?
How about you webapps?
Game servers that you play your games on?
The computer in your car?
You phone maybe?
Your radio?
Webkit, GNU tools and whatever Apple uses in Mac OS X, "The most friendly computers"
Etc, etc, etc...
In other words: Yo
Re:Let's Remember (Score:4, Interesting)
That's fair, but it's also worth keeping in mind that "Fork it if you don't like it" is only better than a closed source product if you have the resources and expertise to fork it. Otherwise, you're just as helpless.
Beyond that, the software that will eventually replace the old DOS-based crap you're talking about will be whatever meets the businesses'/users' needs. If you'd like to see that be your FOSS project rather than a proprietary solution, then paying attention to user requests might be helpful.
If you don't care whether your project gets used... well I guess users have no leverage unless they want to pay you, and maybe not even then.
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I'm rather curious though. What features does VS have that make it so "superior?"
C++ code completion, and data visualizers for debugger watch windows - the kind of stuff that e.g. shows std::map or std::list instances as actual lists of values, and not their internal structure.
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C++ code completion is in all of them
The question is the quality. When I last tried Eclipse CDT, it struggled on pretty much any code with templates (i.e. std::vector or std::string). Qt Creator is noticeably better, but still can't handle things like std::tr1::bind or Boost.Lambda; ditto for VS2008. KDevelop4 and VS2010 can handle pretty much anything you throw at them.
viewing the data in complex structures (including STL) is in most of the modern ones.
Didn't see it in CDT. Sure glad it's in Qt Creator, though.
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