so there are still people... [LWN.net]

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 16, 2018 11:58 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: GCC8 the code patching A.I. by mjw
Parent article: Malcolm: Usability improvements in GCC 8

...who use an editor without on the fly syntax checking and code completion? Why would you do that?

to post comments

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 16, 2018 12:29 UTC (Fri) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (5 responses)

Because it's nice to be able to code without being disturbed.

I generally leave on-the-fly syntax checking on since it shortens build cycles, but turn off automatic code completion (I invoke it manually every now and then, but I typically limit it to tab-completing long names). It's nice to have an continuous stream of thoughts down to the file, as opposed to having a two-way conversation with your editor, which means you need to keep reacting to what it tells you.

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 16, 2018 14:37 UTC (Fri) by raegis (guest, #19594) [Link] (4 responses)

Quote: "Because it's nice to be able to code without being disturbed."

I have not heard a more profound statement all year! Those "helpers" are mostly distractions since they constantly provide hints when you rarely need them. Most of my programming is 95% pen and paper anyway.

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 16, 2018 15:28 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

Ha, yes! Today I experimentally enabled the clang plugin in QtCreator. _While_ I was typing a line of code it already nattered at me about a missing semicolon... I know there wasn't one, I wasn't done typing, interfering busybody!

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 16, 2018 15:37 UTC (Fri) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link]

Just to be clear, I do find in-editor syntax checking a reasonable tradeoff, even though it is sometimes disturbing. It helps that I use vim, where the modality gives reasonably good signals to the editor when it can start trying to compile my stuff (when I exit insert mode).

Also, semantic understanding of the code yields _incredibly_ much better jump-to-definition navigation, which is a huge win, but you don't need to enable any warnings for that, of course.

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 16, 2018 17:05 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Try something more polished, like any IDE from JetBrains.

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 16, 2018 15:29 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And often I find that I type (and *want*) HALF of what *it* thinks I want, so when I hit return at the end of the line it fills in the extra stuff I didn't ask for ...

There's a very good reason I usually call that sort of stuff "auto-CORRUPT".

The problem is, it never seems to stay disabled - that is if I can even find out HOW to disable it :-(

Cheers,
Wol

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 16, 2018 13:01 UTC (Fri) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (8 responses)

Lots of folks! I do kernel development, for example, and most IDEs are constantly low level furious about various aspects of it. For starters, they don’t seem to understand the program structure of a kernel module, and it’s horrible to try to get them to build it.

It’s also probably somewhere between horrible and impossible to get them to not get confused by arch-specific definitions, and they generally can’t understand inline assembly at all, so forget that.

So code completion kinda doesn’t work, and you can’t build, oh and the kernel codebase is too large for most IDEs to hold all of it without bogging down.

I miss having syntax checking and code completion, but only moderately.

I also tend - like most kernel developers, I think - to produce relatively few lines of code. (Few but high effort.). That makes the burden of not having such aids much smaller than if you’re writing up whole big chunks of new stuff.

I’m pretty sure my perspective is typical (though not universal...) in the kernel community, based on what I’ve heard and what my coworkers do.

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 17, 2018 7:08 UTC (Sat) by darwish (guest, #102479) [Link] (7 responses)

Sorry but this is nonsense.

I use Eclipse daily for kernel development, and in the last 3 years have been actually maintaining this semi-official wiki page for how to do that:

https://wiki.eclipse.org/HowTo_use_the_CDT_to_navigate_Li...

After doing the steps above, Eclipse indexes everything as need be for the kernel C99 "free-standing" environment, without errors or any nonsensical warnings. You got all the goodies of auto-complete, automatic global refactoring capabilities, semantic code search, code-followup up to the deepest levels of the kernel, etc.

And the performance is quite good, even on a 5-year old HDD laptop.

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 17, 2018 13:15 UTC (Sat) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (6 responses)

That’s very interesting, when I tried a few years ago, it shat bricks because the Java implementation was too slow. It was utterly unusable. I had a few coworkers who used to go to the trouble to use it, but my understanding is they’ve mostly given up out of irritation with issues like those I cited and also speed. Glad to hear you’ve worked around them.

Also, I don’t think you’d say it’s nonsense that most kernel developers don’t use an IDE. Or if you did, I think it’d be easy to find references showing that’s wrong,

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 18, 2018 6:06 UTC (Sun) by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006) [Link] (5 responses)

Eclipse CDT is simply the best IDE for open source C/C++ projects (at least for embedded linux development), provided you have enough memory (>= 16G) and a decent CPU installed. Have a look at how it fits to large C/C++ projects other than Linux kernel:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkcr/doc...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Develope...

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 18, 2018 18:22 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

Have you tried CLion?

so there are still people...

Posted Feb 19, 2019 6:15 UTC (Tue) by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006) [Link]

I have not, but would like to have a try.

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 18, 2018 23:47 UTC (Sun) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (2 responses)

Ah, so “enough memory” is an amount that only stopped being absurd in the last two years or so, and is still double what standard desktops ship with. No wonder it didn’t work well on my six year old work PC.

Every other Linux coding tool I use doesn’t care what hardware I give it as long as it’s got a desktop class CPU (ie is not a Rasberry Pi or similar). 16 GB is totally reasonable for a heavy duty development workstation, but it’s still quite a bit of RAM...

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 21, 2018 7:56 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (1 responses)

> 16 GB is totally reasonable for a heavy duty development workstation

I thought that as well. My company's procurement though this too. Unfortunately I'm doing Java at work :) Between all the dev tools (I had to increase the heap space for the IDE to fit all the projects I'm working on), the test instances, the million browser tabs with documentation, there's precious little space left for Virtualbox that is needed to communicate with the rest of the company via a certain "enterprise grade" teleconferencing software with an annoyingly proprietary protocol.

But I manage ;)

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 22, 2018 14:04 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And yet 16GB wasn't that expensive ...

I know RAM prices yoyo, but I was lucky and maxed out my motherboard with 4x4GB DDR3 about 5 years ago at about £13/DIMM. £60 for the lot ...

I now want to max out my new mobo but 4x16GB DDR4 at £150/DIMM is a bit much!

Cheers,
Wol

so there are still people...

Posted Mar 17, 2018 13:03 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I use an editor like that. It's just my style and a matter of preference; I don't want my editor mucking about with my text.