Development environments for C++

I have not been a big fan of IDEs. Several times I tried to get used to Visual Studio but always found it big, slow and not suited to the way I work. For a long time my development environment on Linux consisted of multiple instances of Kate (a KDE text editor) each on a different desktop and several small scripts. I would have source files in one editor and headers in another, so when working on a single class a simple keystroke to switch desktops would also switch header and source files. An “edit” script would open the file in the right text editor from the command line – I don’t think I ever used the file open dialog to open a file. Searching across multiple files was done using the GNU id-tools; very fast and easy to filter the output. As others have said, UNIX is the IDE.

Another requirement issupport for writing unit tests and Test Driven Development. With multiple editors open, I can have the test code in one editor and the source in another so switching is simple. A simple script “tests” run from the command line, builds the source, builds the tests and then runs the test cases.  Another script creates a new test function. We use CppUnit for testing, which is OK but does need a lot of boilerplate. Adding a new test requires not only the test function itself but also a declaration in the header file and a registration macro so the function is called by the test suite – this  is C++ so no reflection to automatically pickup the test functions. Since the boiler plate is always the same, except for the function name it is an ideal candidate for a script:

addtest  MyTestClass testFunctionOne testFunctionTwo testFunctionThree

would add three new functions and their declarations to the test class.

So basically, I was happy with my development environment. But there were two problems. I also have to develop on Windows and even with cygwin the environment there always seemed slower and I had to use a different editor. Secondly, all my colleagues use Windows with Visual Studio.  I see them struggling with basic tasks; they ask for my help on some coding problem so I suggest that they open a particular file and 2 minutes later they are still faffing around clicking through directories in a file open dialog. The majority of this problem is probably their knowledge of the environment rather than a problem with VS itself.  But, Visual Studio does have some significant problems for our C++ development.

We use Qt, which has its own project management system. The project is defined in .pro files which are then converted into makefiles by qmake. Visual Studio project files (vproj) files can also be made by qmake, so when a project is updated, the visual studio build files need to updated and then re-loaded. This means we don’t use Visual Studio’s project management functions. Even if we didn’t have this restriction I don’t like vproj files anyway because they are hard to manage in a version control system because they are difficult to merge. The second problem with Visual Studio is that it has no specific support for unit tests.

As a senior developer in the group I have some responsibility for the tools that the other developers use.  They want to use a nice graphical IDE – because it is easier. But I see all sorts of productivity problems in the way that they use it. We have a large code base, use Qt for the GUI and VisualStudio does not seem to handle this well at all.

So what I wanted was a development environment suited to large C++ Qt applications where I could use the same tools on Windows and Linux. It should have enough graphical features to not frighten the junior developers used to their cozy WIMP world but should have enough keyboard shortcuts to allow efficient development and be customizable for our specific requirements.

Then Trolltech released Qt-Creator.  While clearly not as comprehensive as Visual Studio, it is specifically targeted at the type of development that we are doing.  I have now switched to Qt-Creator and the next post will be on my experiences so far.