[cdt-core-dev] feature request

[Jiangbo Nie <niejiangbo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

It is my first time to post message here. I am not sure if it is in
right mail-list... So could you please forward the email to right
person? Thanks in advance.

After using eclipse tools, especially CDT, which time is not very
long, I found it will be better to add some new features in this tool.
Before talking the new requirement, I think the eclipse suite are very
very great.

#1
Many cases I use 3rd party tools to do the diff operation. I don't
think it is a good way. For a common development platform, eclipse
should provide such functions, not only in CDT, but also in JDT.

The detailed suggestion is below,
- After some files are copied or checked out to the working
direcotries, the coder will then modified them (to fix bugs or add new
functions, etc). After the modification, it should has one way to
compare the two files WITHOUT jump out eclipse. Noted, for the "diff"
algorithm in eclipse, you may use your owns, or 3rdparty's. However,
the diff result should stays in elipse GUI.
- The "diff" feature should support not only file, but also
directories.. In short, it should support rich UI functions, please
try some excelent diff tools for reference. For example, Beyond
Compare.
- It will be a plus to let the developer know that the modifications
dynamiclly. That is to say, when a developer is writing some function,
he can easily get the modification he has done in some status
panes/bars (or in special color for the background).

Why is it necessary? I think it happened many times for a developer to
diff files after modification/fixing and before the submit/checkin, so
that the modified code has no problem.


#2
It is better to support static analysis for c/c++ code. See lint for
reference. For example, memory leak, bad code style, assert() static
analysis, whether some code can be reachable... Due to the knowledge,
I can not give more examples.

Why is it necessary? I think it will help developer to avoid some
low-grade error and increase developing efficiency.

#3
MinGW is a very good tool to develop Win32 software, and Dev C++ is a
also a good tool to provide GUI interface. But neither Dev C++, nor
eclipse provide building GUI forms visually, just like Visual C++
does.

Of course, it is easy to provide uniform method to build java GUI, but
for C/C++ it might be difficult, since C/C++ is not cross platform.
Even though that, I think it is necessary to implement such tools. We
can provide plugin based on CDT to visually build Win32 GUI, and other
ones to build other different GUIs.

By the way, the Visual Editer, which is used in JDT, is very very
slow. After several time using, I gave up to use the VE and continue
to write code by hand.

Why is it necessary? I think some visual tools will abstract more
developers to give up visual studio. Many application fileds can use
this tool and throw MS's tools away.

#4
I know UML for java has been implemented, even if it is not totally
free. I think for CDT, some UML tools are also needed. The reason is
skip.


Thanks,
Jiangbo