JetBrains is working on a cross-platform C++ IDE

http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/features/cpp.html

by amatheus • 13 years ago

131 132 13 years ago

niggler3• 13 years ago

I'm confused by this. If you had a particularly good IDE in a particular OS, why wouldn't you use a VM and run that OS for the purpose of the IDE? Especially if its on Linux.

norswap2• 13 years ago

Well, the only good C++ IDE (according to many people) is Visual Studio, which is tuned for Microsoft-flavoured C++ (which should follow standard, but like always, some slight difference with g++ I suppose). Also not being able to run the code on the platform where you code is incredibly annoying.

niggler3• 13 years ago

I don't see where it said they would support multiple compilers. It does say they are integrating with Clang analyzer, but no indication of native support for MSVC idiosyncracies

thwest• 13 years ago

Both MSVC and g++ have some C++ language extensions enabled by default. Examples include msvc allowing you to drop 'typename' where the compiler can deduce that a token is actually a type, and g++ allowing variable length arrays.

Visual Studio works great on cross platform code bases. It is so much better than Eclipse, but I'll stick with vim :)

alexkcd• 13 years ago

I recommend checking out Qt Creator. It's cross platform, has code completion, live syntax checking, supports regular Makefiles, C++11, and much more.

Plus, if you're looking to build a cross platform GUI app, Qt is a great toolkit, and Qt Creator (as the name suggests) supports drag&drop UI building, QML etc.

Derbasti• 13 years ago

frankly, I think Visual Studio is a sub-par IDE for C++. Code highlighting is pretty bare bones. Debugging often misses stack frames and it regularly loses access to local variables. There is practically no refactoring support. The compiler has a weird non-standard feature set. Auto completion as usually not context aware. "Find usage" usually does not find every reference. I could go on...

When people rave about Visual Studio, they are mostly talking about C# development. And even there, they often talk about Resharper.

That said, install Visual Assist X and Visual Studio becomes quite a decent C++ IDE. That does not fix debugging or the compiler of course, but refactoring, highlighting, code navigation, contextual cues and auto completion are mightily improved.

pjmlp6• 13 years ago

g++ is no standard. ANSI and ISO are.

Contrary to many in FOSS think, all C and C++ compiler vendors have language extensions and gcc is not immune to this.

ibrahima• 13 years ago

I wish all the best to them. Eclipse with CDT is OK but often just blows up in my face. The last time I tried to use it I ended up switching to Emacs completely :/. But I love IntelliJ for Java, Ruby, and Python, would love to see them build a nice C++ IDE along those lines.

Not having used AppCode I don't know how good the support is for C++ already. I wonder if they will be using clang/llvm for static analysis? Though I don't know much about that area, I've noticed that all C++ IDEs that I've tried (including MSVC++) are much poorer than Java IDEs in that aspect.

niggler3• 13 years ago

"I wonder if they will be using clang/llvm for static analysis?"

From the page:

"The IDE will be integrated with Clang Analyzer, so that more than 2000 code inspections and error diagnostics results from Clang compiler would be shown right in the editor. Of course, you also would be able to review them in a bulk mode"

martin_3• 13 years ago

Don't these already exist? For example codeblocks?

ansgri• 13 years ago

Does codeblocks have advanced code manipulation tools, i.e. refactoring support (in the presence of complex templated code)? It's an extremely complex problem for C++, and JetBrains seem to have the right brains to solve it.

martin_3• 13 years ago

Doesn't look like it - AppCode definitely looks way better, I was just curious that there may be others in this arena already.

zalzane• 13 years ago

Codeblocks is essentially notepad with a gui for mingw compiler options. It cant be compared with visual studio in terms of development, refactoring, and debugging tools.

martin_3• 13 years ago

Their features page states otherwise: http://www.codeblocks.org/features -- Multiple compilers (Mingw, MSVC, Borland, and more).. Build in debugger, plugin support, etc. I haven't used it, so i'm just assuming their website is accurate

geon• 13 years ago

> notepad with a gui for mingw compiler options

That was a bit harsh. It definitely isn't VS, but there is code navigation, auto completion, debugging etc.

andrewcooke• 13 years ago

eclipse is the best c ide out there at the moment for non-ms platforms.

intellij idea used to have a third-party c/c++ plugin, which was ok, but it stopped being maintained a while back. this was frustrating because otherwise you can develop in intellij in most popular languages. so c/c++ support had been a strange omission for some time - see this support issue, for example - http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-86304

(i haven't seen anything saying that this will be an intellij idea plugin - but afaik that's how all their other products work).

pjmlp6• 13 years ago

Netbeans is also quite good, given that it is the official IDE for Solaris development.

What I miss in Netbeans is an integrated static analyzer like Eclipse's CDT (Codan).

melling2• 13 years ago

Then all we'll need is a great cross-platform UI toolkit. People have been working on them for 20 years but I not sure if anything really works well.

username111• 13 years ago

This is the reason I don't use jetbrains products, I use linux and the Java font rendering is absolutely awful, I've tried all the fixes and I can't find any of them pleasing enough to use.

kunai3• 13 years ago

Why don't you try Qt Jambi or GTK+ if Swing on Linux is awful? GTK integrates perfectly with Linux if you're using GNOME.

Just a thought.

cdi• 13 years ago

I fixed font rendering on linux in IntelliJ for me by deleting hinting information from font in fontforge editor. Google it.

pooriaazimi• 13 years ago

@martinced: You've been hellbanned for the past 5 days. Which is a shame - your comments are long and informative.

> I'm using IntelliJ IDEA on Linux since version 4 or so (we're now at version 12).

> And I agree with you but...

> The trick is to use a pixel perfect font with no anti-aliasing at all and to set the correct vertical spacing between lines and then IntelliJ is just going to look fine (for a Java app).*

> So first you go download a real font (a font made especially for programming, like the Proggy fonts which you can get at proggyfonts) (I take the .ttf version)

> You relaunch IntelliJ and then go to:

> Settings / IDE Settings / Appearance / Editor / Colors & Fonts / Font and then you set your pixel perfect font, say :

> ProggySquareTT (Size: 16, Line spacing: 1.3)*

> (oh and btw IntelliJ is so stupid that if you have "Show only monospaced fonts" checked it won't understand that Proggy is monospaced and hence not show it into your fonts choice list)

> I'm 40 years old and still have 10/10 eye vision, which I attribute to two things: avoid dark characters on light background scheme anytime it's possible and never ever using anti-aliased fonts (which are blurry)

> "Pixel perfect" is the way to go here. And anyway anti-aliased fonts under Linux are so fugly compared to OS X / Windows that you're really not missing much by going pixel perfect.

> Regarding the other IntelliJ IDEA fonts (the ones which are not the editor / console), I'm stealing a Tahoma.ttf from Windows and settings everything to be Tahoma.

> Same for my Emacs but for whatever reason under Emacs I'm using Terminus and not Proggy at the moment ; )

> Now of course it's really sad that the only "ok" desktop UI ever made with Swing is the one made by JetBrains: it took people who wrote the fscking most advanced Java IDE to come up with a reasonably looking Java Swing app : (

> The Eclipse guys didn't even bother and created their own UI (SWT) which kinda speaks volume about the nameless mediocrity that Swing is : (

zem• 13 years ago

qt works superbly. i wish it had more language bindings, but other than that it's an excellent cross-platform toolkit.

swah4• 13 years ago

Strangely, Sublime Text seems to win hearts on every platform...

melling2• 13 years ago

"Edwin: Sublime Text is written in C++, with a small amount of Objective-C for Cocoa integration on OS X, and Python for plugins."

http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-0-re...

In short, they used the native libraries on Mac OS X.

veeti• 13 years ago

Qt, Qt, Qt. Basically the only toolkit that gets native look & feel right.

wtallis2• 13 years ago

Qt is great for getting the native look, but it's never mastered the native feel, at least on OS X.

zura• 13 years ago

wxWidgets is worth mentioning. And instead of mimicking, it uses native widgets/controls under the hood.

The non-GUI part of the framework is a quite decent as well.

ArtB• 13 years ago

Will this be integrated with IntelliJ or available as a module/plugin?

tregoning• 13 years ago

Wondering the same... specially since IntellJ is supposed to encompass all other Jetbrains IDEs

nevster• 13 years ago

I don't know the precise answer to the original question. But with regards to AppCode it's pretty much a standalone product that has features IntelliJ doesn't.

IntelliJ incorporates everything found in all the other IDEs like RubyMine and PyCharm but doesn't include the additional stuff found in AppCode.

Watabou4• 13 years ago

I love IntelliJ for java development but I never got why I might need a big IDE for c/C++. I just use Vim for that. I mean it does omnicompletion and code correction with clang, has snippets, support for switching between header and source code files.

It works pretty well for me. Even sublime text would do the job since it has all of those features too.

What do IDEs have over Vim in terms of features that I may be missing out on? For java, I would definitely use IntelliJ because of the debugging features alone but I think it's overkill for something like C/C++/Python

swah4• 13 years ago

Does your comment suggests that you're using Java for more complex stuff than you would ever use C++?

Watabou4• 13 years ago

Not really, I just prefer using lldb/gdb or just simple printf/couts for debugging purposes.

For Java, you really can't get decent code checking with vim unless you use a the eclim plugin and that just feels like a hack.

MrUnknown• 13 years ago

To me, it seems like a lot of these light-weight Non-IDE text editors, are basically IDEs anyway. You just said sublime and Vim have most of the features of an IDE.

I personally use RubyMine, and while I don't use the debugging a whole lot, it comes in handy with some really confusing issues. Other than that, it is just a fancy text editor that I have become used to for Ruby work.

swah4• 13 years ago

I love ST3, but there is no true completion, debugger, refactoring, a way to run tests, Git integration...

Even the build system is quite simple...

gregschlom2• 13 years ago

What about smart refactoring? Being able to rename just about anything (methods, classes, variables, etc...) and knowing that your IDE will do all the right stuff.

What about instantly knowing who calls that method or uses that class or that variable, with much more flexibility than just grepping through the code?

Those are the features I use the most in any IDE.

azov• 13 years ago

Why does it have to be lumped into IDE? Both could be written as standalone utilities that your favorite editor can call.

I think IDEs hurt innovation in development tools more than almost anything else. They are like crack for your workflow - easy to get started with, but once you're on them you're stuck. Plugging in better tools into existing IDE is a big PIA if possible at all, and rewriting the whole IDE is a huge undertaking for any company who wants to make your life better.

Watabou4• 13 years ago

I'm not really sure what you mean but vim does refactoring just fine with ack/vimgrep with bufdo (applies any vim commands to the current list of buffers)

It also has ctags support so you can navigate your code, go to a method/variable/class name and instantly find out where it was defined and such.

qdog2• 13 years ago

I rarely refactor across entire projects, but I'm fairly certain vim has plugins that can do that.

As for finding what calling methods there are, as other have stated, you can use ctags, or go full throttle with Cscope - http://cscope.sourceforge.net/ it will do textual searches along with displaying all callers for a method across all the files you tell it to search (in setup).

With the vim gui and a cscope backend, I'm pretty sure vim is just as much an IDE as any of the other editors. It just happens to work fine in a terminal, too.

stinos• 13 years ago

Have you ever used the debugger in Visual Studio? That is THE thing I miss in vim and the likes (yes there's vimgdb ect but that's peanuts in comparision). Combined with the features mentioned by others, that is why poeple want a set of tools that integrate with each other, hence the name, instead of a bunch of standalone tools that also work but don't know enough about each other to seamlessly play together.

johncoltrane2• 13 years ago

Why do so many people seem to miss IDE features when they use something that is so obviously not an IDE?

roel_v2• 13 years ago

"For java, I would definitely use IntelliJ because of the debugging features alone but I think it's overkill for something like C/C++/Python"

Not sure if you're trolling, but how much C++ do you write? If you have to ask what the difference is between VS and Vim, and are suggesting that writing C++ is more like Python than Java, you haven't used C++ and/or VS much.

(context: I have 10+ years of experience with VS and 15+ with Vim, which is my everyday editor for everything except non-trivial C++ code)

zpk• 13 years ago

I love IntelliJ, I sound like I work for them. I don't.... If you do Python web development, specifically Django you can debug your application with that. Never tried straight Python, but probably that too.

___1___• 13 years ago

100% this is my opinion, I learnt C++ using VS and eclipse; I can't remember when or why but I fairly quickly picked up Vim + compiler and it just felt better suited to native development.

Further more the skills feel more real, I can apply my usage of vim and how the tool chain works to other languages.

georgehaake2• 13 years ago

I signed up for a newsletter regarding this release yesterday. Received an email from Jetbrains that it was a April Fools joke.

sidww2• 13 years ago

It wasn't an April Fools joke http://blog.jetbrains.com/objc/2013/04/c-ide-an-april-fools-...

georgehaake2• 13 years ago

Right, this is what I received.

Hi from JetBrains,

This is a short but important note about the C++ IDE we revealed yesterday: Yes, it was an April Fools' joke, but the IDE is actually real.

Thanks for believing and subscribing to the list. As soon as we have something ready, you'll be the first to know and try it out. Stay tuned!

Oh, and if you use a Mac, you are welcome to try C/C++ in AppCode and let us know what you think.

Develop with pleasure! The JetBrains Team www.jetbrains.com

thejosh• 13 years ago

I hope that it's not in Java, because their other products for Linux have really bad fonts.

ultimoo2• 13 years ago

True. I have somehow never liked how desktop applications written in Java turn out. I don't know whether it is because they don't use a native windowing toolkit or something else.

gregschlom2• 13 years ago

Most Java apps nowadays use the native windowing toolkit. SWT for example (the major gui framework for Java) uses GTK on Linux, Cocoa on OSX and Win32 API on Windows

pjmlp6• 13 years ago

Usually the blame is on the developers that don't make use of what Java offers.

There used to be a blog series explaining developers how to take advantage of Swing to make nice UIs. The problem is that most don't care and use whatever is the default.

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

My experience with IntelliJ on Linux is that after a short time spent in the IDE, the software maxes out the OS open files limit (even if you've bumped it up to, say, 4096) and crash horribly (usually blowing away some percentage of the IDE's own configuration each time). Fonts are the least of their problems.

koalaman• 13 years ago

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2010/04/native-file-system-w...

dorolow• 13 years ago

This is excellent news. PyCharm has been great to work with, along with every other JetBrains product barring AppCode. I attempted to try to replace Xcode with AppCore for C++ development as I was put off by some of characteristics of Xcode and had many positive experiences with JetBrains. AppCode ended up modifying my preexisting Xcode project that I had opened, changing several settings that silently broke my build. I don't really recall what settings it broke in particular, but I just reverted so it wasn't that big of a deal. It didn't end up suiting my purposes very well as the C++ support just wasn't that great at the time. It seemed like a decent IDE if you do ObjC work, though.

thrush• 13 years ago

coming from a student who did most of their learning in C++, this sounds awesome. period.

rch• 13 years ago

>>Built-in support for Doxigen documentation system for all supported languages.

Great feature, but it's Doxygen with a 'y'.

Daegalus• 13 years ago

This is great. It already handles pretty much every other language. Once it gets this. And maybe C# through monogame. it will be the ultimate IDE.

Love jetbrains products. Best $200 i ever spent on Ultimate

kombine• 13 years ago

Something that people already mentioned, but still. There is great Visual Studio for Windows and for cross-platform development there is Qt Creator. The latter also comes with a full-fledged development framework that allows you do GUI, threading, networking, databases: it is effectively what a standard library should be. It also really fast and has a slick interface allowing to do code navigation really fast. I don't have to tell you what I use for C++ development. So it will be very hard for them to compete with existing options.

uuilly• 13 years ago

Qt Creator is a wonderful IDE. I've used many and never seen one better. And the Qt libs are underrated for non-gui systems development.

qompiler2• 13 years ago

Except for the fact that Qt is not as cross-platform as the standard C++ library. Qt also uses non-C++ features such as signals/slots which require usage of their own Meta Object Compiler.

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

You can do stock C++ work in the Qt IDE, it's perfectly happy doing it.

mpyne3• 13 years ago

Qt's moc is a preprocessor/code-generator which compiles to standard C++.

Do you also tell people that they shouldn't use flex/lex/bison/yacc/antlr/etc.? Why are those code generators/DSLs acceptable but the moc is not? It's not as if the Qt authors added it because they don't understand C++, they added it because it solves a vexing problem in C++ GUI design.

larve• 13 years ago

I find QT Creator underwhelming, especially compared to intellij. You have to stick to a single window, the interface to gdb causes me to pull my hair out most of the time under OSX, the refactoring support is almost absent, the keyboard shortcuts are a pain to manage (to make it emacsy, at least a bit).

I currently use eclipse for my embedded C++ project, and QT creator for QT apps (QT is wonderful!), but intellij for pretty much everything else. Looking forward to this.

mpyne3• 13 years ago

Qt, friend, Qt. QT is QuickTime.

rplnt• 13 years ago

There's also KDevelop, cross-platform C/C++ IDE. I've only used it for C, and only on Linux but it was a great experience. It's supposed to support other languages as well, and I've tried python, but had no luck with it.

pron• 13 years ago

... and NetBeans. And Eclipse.

jbester• 13 years ago

I'm guessing it's aimed more at the embedded/system programming crowd. Visual Studio is a PITA when you aren't targetting Win32. Right now we use eclipse which has pretty substandard C++ support.

pjmlp6• 13 years ago

This is great! Looking forward for it, there are very few mature C++ IDEs around and this would be a nice addition, specially if it matches their offering in other languages.

ed_blackburn• 13 years ago

Is only me or they missing a trick by skipping C#? Or are they concerned it'll disrupt Resharper sales? Or is there simple not a market for C# outside of Visual Studio and MonoDevelop?

berkut• 13 years ago

What's it built in? Java I'd imagine?

IntelliJ was almost perfect for Java (last used it 3 years ago), other than the ridiculous memory usage and the constant freezing which I'm pretty sure the JVM's GC was responsible for.

I've been using Qt Creator for C++ code for the past 3 years, and it's so much faster and non-laggy it's lovely - even when having some serious things missing (multiple monitor support).

pkolaczk4• 13 years ago

IntelliJ Idea does not use more than 1/30 of my laptop memory with a huge project open. Constant freezing? This must have been a bug, because I'm using it for 2 years now, and no freezing at all, and autocomplete / navigation / find-usages are crazy fast. It gets a little sluggish only when I switch branches and it has to reindex hundred megabytes of jars. Well, but how often you do it...

BTW: Comparing it to Qt creator is very unfair, because Qt creator does not have half of the features included in IntelliJ. E.g. refactoring / inspections / full type-aware error highlighting (not just syntax checking).

webreac• 13 years ago

10 years ago, I have used SNiFF+ (from windriver). This seams to have disappeared. It was very flexible for cross-platform (MSVC and HP) development in C++ and java. I think there are many good ideas in SNiFF+ that could be taken.

maligree• 13 years ago

Huh. I'm surprised by how many comments here are of the "but we already have XYZ" flavor.

You're right. We don't need more. Let's just stop trying to make things better.

Wakey, wakey. JetBrains is investing time and money (or is that the same thing, anyway?) to develop a new C++ IDE, a market (though I don't like that word) where nothing new has sprung up in a while. That's __good__ news, what's the matter with you? Can it harm you?

weitzj• 13 years ago

I am really looking forward to this IDE.What I am missing is a good profiling tools integration. So hopefully they have this in mind.MacOsX gives them a lot of stuff for free with DTrace and clang, so I am excited how this will work on Linux. (does it have DTrace?) Maybe I will be better off using this new IDE with Solaris or FreeBSD.

akandiah3• 13 years ago

I've just downloaded and tried AppCode (which I believe this product will be an extension of). It is written in Java and is rather slow when compared to XCode and Visual Studio 2008. The real memory usage on my system for this product is ~340MB which is rather heavy when dealing with a Hello World project.

When dealing with C/C++ or ObjectiveC I expect something that's very light and quick to load - not something that feels this bloated!

pkolaczk4• 13 years ago

340 MB is heavy? What are you coding on? A netbook?

BTW: measuring memory usage on a Hello world project is pointless. You can't extrapolate this value to memory usage on large projects. Most of this memory is just code of the IDE and plugins, which does not depend on the project size. I work on some really huge projects in IntelliJ Idea, sometimes 3 or more at the same time and it never needed more than 512 MB of heap, which is pretty impressive result, considering how much it actually does (all the inspections / type checking / background compilation / autocomplete come at some price in memory usage; most of the C++ editors you mentioned don't support them to such extent, or sometimes at all).

akandiah3• 13 years ago

>340 MB is heavy? What are you coding on? A netbook?

I take it that you haven't tried coding on Visual Studio? Just because you have the memory, it doesn't mean that you should be using as much memory as you can.

> I work on some really huge projects in IntelliJ Idea, sometimes 3 or more at the same time and it never needed more than 512 MB of heap

That's because that amount is set as the maximum heap size. If any more memory is required, the disk swapping becomes heavier and heavier. Have a look at your idea.vmoptions file to see what the maximum allowable usage is set for your install.

> most of the C++ editors you mentioned don't support them to such extent, or sometimes at all

They don't support it for C or C++ due to inherent limitations in the compilation of the language - not because they are unable to do so! Visual Studio does all of what you've mentioned for languages which compile to an IL code (i.e those that rely on the .NET framework) with great ease.

sqqqrly• 13 years ago

The Linux CLI is an IDE. I do not need another...

nd-ebrp• 13 years ago

Recently, JetBrains (the company), their ReSharper product, and their JVM language Kotlin were all deleted from the English language Wikipedia.

I can't follow the deletionists' logic. I hope nothing else is going on -- like a competitor trying to remove information about them.

Kotlin's removal in particular is strange, since several other JVM languages persists at Wikipedia, some of them much less well known than Kotlin. Still there are: Gosu, Ceylon, Fantom, Ioke, Seph, Groovy, Boo, Nashorn, Frink, Pizza, Pnuts, X10, Xtend, etc.

Very strange.

vorg• 13 years ago

The JetBrains Kotlin webpage http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/Kotlin/Welcome still shows Kotlin as active.

It's certainly better known than any of those other languages you mentioned. In fact, the two greatest innovators on the Groovy language, James Strachan (original creator of Groovy), and Alex Tkachman (original creator of Groovy's static mode), were "encouraged" to move on from Groovy by its present leadership, and are both now contributors to Kotlin.

JetBrains is working on a cross-platform C++ IDE

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