Monday, April 18, 2016

My quick opinions of Eclipse CDT vs CLion

In my last post, I mentioned I found a neat feature in Eclipse, but that I still use CLion most of the time. This begs the obvious question: Why don't I just use Eclipse / CDT full time?

Well, I initially switched because of two main reasons: 1) annoyance with the time it always took getting the IDE setup to recognize all my various include paths, library paths, options, etc... and 2), the fact that CODAN* (the static analyzer in CDT) seems to miss a lot of situations. So I decided to give it another shot.

I mostly work with CMake projects - a given, since I'm using CLion, and it's biggest downside is it ONLY works with CMake - so I used the CMake Eclipse project generator. It seemed to work fairly well, which helped with 1)... but longer term, the fact that I would potentially need to re-run it any time the CMake changed... which in turn would mean I could lose any project settings / changes I made from within Eclipse - is a worry. Plus the fact that I have to run a separate command line tool frequently is a turn off.

Still, those are things I could deal with... except it seemed that 2), CODAN's unreliable, is still a factor. I had only been using it for 5 minutes before coming across a situation which CODAN incorrectly flagged as an error, but which CLion got right. I always find it annoying to have all those extraneous red highlights in my IDE, so back I went to CLion...

...but, I still keep Eclipse open for that Shift+Alt+T action!

*...though, if this is named after the infamous Armada in "The Last Starfighter," thumbs up to that!

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