Developer IDE

[Rick C. Hodgin]

In the last many years, I have primarily used Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2015, 2017, and most recently 2019. All of them are adequate for doing what I do. I prefer Visual Studio 2008 because it's offline, and modern enough it works like a charm.

However, I've recently had occasion to create a Windows 2000 Professional developer environment, and I installed Visual Studio 98 (C++ module only) and I am amazed, absolutely amazed at how fast it is. Compilation is considerably faster than in Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2019. And edit-and-continue is nearly instantaneous.

If you have access to some of these old tools, you might want to install them to see what all it affords you. I have dyslexia, and I make all kinds of really odd coding mistakes all the time. Not from me not knowing how to code, but from me typing it in wrong (dyslexia and its spectrum of related disorders also translate into typing and speaking, not just reading). Having such a fast edit-and-continue has greatly increased my ability to write code.

For my personal 32-bit code development I may never go back.

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Rick C. Hodgin

PS -- What IDEs do you all use? I use CodeLite for GCC/GDB related development and debugging in 32-bit and 64-bit. Specifically I use version 13.0. I use Visual Studio for nearly all Windows development. I use Open Watcom for some Windows development and all OS/2 development (and yes OS/2 is still being maintained -- see os2world.com. They've even released a new version called ArcaOS by a company called Arca Noae). They still have showcases each year at something called Warpstock. One in the U.S. and another in Europe. You can find past years' archives on YouTube.

 

[Rick C. Hodgin]

Note: I should say a few things about Visual Studio 98. It's great. Is not interpreted (not .NET). Runs natively on real hardware, which is why it's so fast. But...

I miss the Code Definition window. I miss some of the more modern editor's features, like multi-row-by-column editing mode. I miss having the source line highlighted when single-stepping or on break points. Little things. I was able to give it the blue appearance by changing the Control Panel -> Display -> Appearance color properties. I used RGB(179,194,227) for the blue background, and for the window borders and desktop RGB(71,95,143).

I added in version 2048 of Visual Assist X and it adds in refactoring, contextual searching, additional syntax highlighting, a class layout, and many other nice features.

All in all it's a powerful little developer environment, one that's blazingly fast on modern machines.

 

[xwb]

VS98-2008 are OK unless you have a huge system. As the system gets bigger, intellisense gets worse. Eventually, it stops working altogether and you have to switch it off just to develop. VS2010-2019 are a lot slower (about 10 times slower if you run it on a Celeron) but it uses a database for intellisense instead of a home-brew lookup table so it always works. Just a trade for speed vs reliability. Having said that, it is one of the few IDEs where you can mix languages.

You need VS2008 onwards for 64-bit development.

VSCode is nice and fast - works on Windows and Linux.

Codelite is very crashy. I've only used it once where it didn't crash or lockup

Codeblocks is a VS lookalike but depending on how you get to a menu, it will give different results. I always found VS a lot better.

Codewarrior is a bit slow. Haven't used it for about 10 years.

MPLabs is OK for PIC development.

Geany - takes a while to start up. Haven't used it on a largish project. It can do projects as well as single files.

Eclipse - has very large tabs. It is only as fast as java/C#.

Sun Forte is OK but only works on SunOS. Haven't used this since 2002.

emacs just eats memory like there is no tomorrow. It is forever running out of memory.

gnat works quite well for Ada and C/C++

Silverfrost IDE works quite well for Fortran and C/C++

I haven't used Watfor/Watcom since I started using Fortran 90.

 

[Rick C. Hodgin]

Codelite is very crashy. I've only used it once where it didn't crash or lockup

I've never seen that behavior. It's been stable. I haven't used every version, but I have used extensively 6.0 and 6.1, and 13.0. The 6.0 and 6.1 versions come with MinGW compilers built-in and are very nice installs for quick-and-dirty GCC/GDB code on a Windows box.

A really good editor is The SemWare Editor. Versions are available for Windows and DOS. It has a tremendous macro language and macro library. It's extensible. Has on-the-fly macros. Quite nice.

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Rick C. Hodgin

 

[Rick C. Hodgin]

Versions are available for Windows and DOS...

Also Linux. The same settings and configurations work in all three, and the UI is essentially the same (in DOS it's in text mode, but in Windows and Linux it uses the GUI).

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Rick C. Hodgin