The Final Countdown (and thoughts on Cross Platform IDEs *finally*)

Hi all,

As I write this I prepare for my last weekend of eating "normally." On Monday I go in for preoperative testing, that also happens to be the day I start a two week diet of specially formulated protein shakes from Bariatric Advantage.  This is both good and bad, good in the sense that I have my meals planned for the next two weeks, bad in the sense that my stomach is full sized and so these shakes will not in any way satisfy me.

Now, I have been promising a blog post on cross platform IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) for awhile so here it is. To start, there are no good cross platform IDEs, because there are no "good" IDEs. All IDEs are about trade-offs, all of them are idiosyncratic and we must accept this because an IDE is the most general programming tool available. With that out of the way the next problem has to do with language. Oddly the most useful IDEs around are for JAVA.

Eclipse leads the pack of course, and it fits the bill for a cross platform IDE, the problem is that production JAVA code is pretty much an in-house affair, most of the code that escapes into the wild, for better or worse is, C/C++ or Python. This is where Eclipse falls down, it is the ultimate in shitshowing when it comes to C/C++ because CDT is terrible, terrible to set up, terrible to use on a daily basis. The next cross platform IDE isn't cross platform but maybe if your clever, the code it produces is, I am talking about Visual Studio, which is the standard coding platform for any professional outfit. Hopefully your code is ANSI C++ avoiding any of the proprietary stuff you could get some cross platform code, I have done this and it is a monumental bitch.

Finally I have found a solution I think, Netbeans is the best IDE I can find so far. It is truly cross platform it does pretty much every language imaginable and it has a feature for selecting available libraries installed on your system, which is much better than Visual Studio where you have to go through a metric tonne of windows just to add a single DLL to your project. However this a compromise choice, it is not as good for JAVA as Eclipse, it is not a fully featured as Visual Studio but I think it may be the sweet spot.