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Re: C++ Anyone

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Re: C++ Anyone

Subject: Re: C++ Anyone
From: Thomas Engelmeier <email@hidden>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:22:56 +0100

1. Any reason to use Eclipse (or another IDE) over XCode?
Xcode's biggest advantage really is that it's from Apple. So you know it will support new technologies first. (The Xcode team has early knowledge of Apple's future direction.) For example, Xcode is the only thing that supports development for Intel Macs, it was the first to support Mach-O, etc. It's also free (as in beer).

I'm not sure if this is the biggest advantage. I'd rather call it the biggest weakness - at least when it comes down to C++. My impression is the official Apple doctrine can be paraphrased as "C++ is unproductive, use Cocoa", and many times I cannot resist the impression XCode has not really been tested against any C++ that goes beyond the contents of the first edition of B. Stroustrups book.

Examples coming to my mind are: Templates sometimes break autocompletion, namespaces bust pretty much everything (modeller, completion,... ), error messages are harder to read than in competing IDEs, the debugger interface used to have severe deficiencies with templates and automatically created multiple CTORs, Objective-C++ is a mere interface layer that is really hard to use in an exception- safe manner and compile times exceed my patience on an Powerbook by far when the code is template-heavy.

I'm no C++ guru, but I have read that CodeWarrior's C++ library is much better than Xcode/gcc's.

The gcc 2.x library was for me unusuable, with the 3.x variant my code needed slight modifications and the 4.x variant catched up quite a lot. Without much benchmarking (90% of my codebase will compile only in Codewarrior until the SDKs of the major publishing programs are revised) I still consider the Metrowerks implementation better optimized, though. The good news is the author of the Metrowerks C++ standard library now works at Apple.

You say your 'goal is to become proficient [again] without any dependancies to any one platform'. In that case, I do recommend you use more than one IDE, it helps keep things portable.

IMNSHO for learning purposes - i.e. "toy projects exhibiting language features" BBEdit, make or preferrably ant and the commandline make a neat combo.

Regards,
	Tom_E

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