Gurjeet Singh wrote:
> Thomas, I love the idea of eclipse; any platform, any language,
> one IDE. I am downloading it right now. Can you please send in the
> steps that you perform to setup the environment, including mingw
> toolkit; I will try to grow on that.
My setup is pretty basic. I can't give you an exact step by step instruction since it's been
a while since I last did it. I installed msys, mingw, Eclipse. and then, using the Eclipse
update manager and the 'Callisto' site, I installed the C/C++ plugin.
I also made sure that the PATH in effect for the Eclipse IDE contains entries for the
%MSYS_HOME%\bin and %MINGW_HOME%\bin. That's it basically.
> The idea of this effort is to
> have a GUI IDE, with a slew of features that MSVC offers: Memory
> window that allows you to edit memory inplace, call-stack window,
> watches, quick-expression evaluater with class/struct support, etc.
> etc. . If Eclipse can offer all these, then I dont think anyone would
> mind using it insead of MSVC.
>
Eclipse won't offer all of these. Not yet anyway. What you get is a fair C/C++ editor and
parsers for your make output that will annotate your files with errors and warnings. There's
said to be some debugging support too on top of gdb, but to be honest, I've never tried it
on Windows. I do my C-debugging using gdb on Linux. My attempts to use gdb on Windows have
been quite futile so far. Then again, I'm not using the latest MinGW version so perhaps
there's still hope.
All in all, Eclipse C/C++ has some way to go before it can match up with MSVC. My point was
that you can do Windows development without MSVC and you can do it fairly well. If you are a
Linux hacker, you might even prefer doing it that way. So as a platform, Windows is not by
any means "left alone".
I really think that what you and others are trying to accomplish is very valuable. If not
for me (since I'm mixing Java and C and work on multiple platforms) then certainly for many
others. Personally, I'd rather see a Visual Studio port than one for VC++6.0. I wish you the
best of luck.
Regards,
Thomas Hallgren
