Which is the best open source C/C++ IDE out there?

Vladimir Tsvetkov npacemo at gmail.com
Sun Jan 8 13:30:17 PST 2006


> This is obviously a trick question, because real
> programmers don't use IDEs. Case Closed.

I'm not a real programmer, but UNIX is a great developer environment.
It's a tool based environment.
Small tools, strong cohesion in what they are designed for, easy ways
to combine them to form more complex tasks.
Good documentation too.
Actually you don't need anything else, you don't need a colourfull IDE. But...
Maybe only few, really exceptional people can benefit and grok the
power of this kind of environments.
To me the ideal "IDE" is actually a toolkit:
- Source Editor, preferably with a object browser or other kind of a
source browser. An autocomplete functionallity could increase
productivity too - this could increase quality if we measure quality
of code by the low number of syntax mistakes, but this could also be a
threat to quality letting the programmer write without reading
carefully what is written - code bloating.
- Compiler with a debugger. We must discuss about the pros. and cons.
of a grafic debugger versus a text-mode debugger. The things are
getting really messy when it comes up to debugging multithreading code
and I really don't know what is the ultimate tool for this task.
- A build tool. Ant or make will suffice.
- Source control tools. CVS, SVN etc.
- Documentation tools. POD, Doxygen, Javadoc or something else.
- Unit testing framework. This is not always a tool. This could be a
language extension, or  a testing API.
- Other tools.

You don't need to put everything together in a single swissknife-tool,
but this could be convenient in some cases.

IDE vs. Toolbased Environments ???

Which is more productive and how to measure productiveness?

Best Regards,
Vladimir Tsvetkov


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list