[cdt-dev] CDT does not perform will with "large" projects

[Jesper Eskilson <jesper.eskilson@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm trying to use CDT to do C++-development on a fairly large code
base (several thousand source files) which has a CMake-based build
system. I'm using the CDT4 CMake generator to generate a (single,
large) CDT project which I can import into Eclipse.  Unfortunately,
after spending several hours trying to get things to work smoothly, I
think I finally have to give up and resort back to Emacs, at least for
the time being.

First, something I've wished for a long time: CDT should have a way of
guiding users to get their indexing working correctly. If the indexer
isn't working now, it is not at all obvious what is wrong or how to
fix it. A tutorial or step-by-step guide readily accessible from
inside CDT would be a great help. When I hear people whine about
Visual Studio, it is almost always about IntelliSense not working
properly. Not having a working autocompleter kills the entire idea of
using CDT.

Some of my observations/questions:

* The CMake generator did not properly set up the set of include
  paths. None of the GCC system include paths were added. After
  manually adding them, I had to rebuild the entire index. Just
  updating the index did not help.

* When my CMake-project is open, Eclipse is regularly totally
  unresponsive for several seconds up to sometimes several minutes,
  with no visible cue as to what it is doing.

* The indexer takes a very long time to run and is very
  memory-hungry. IMHO, if CDT is to be a competitive alternative to
  Visual Studio, the indexer performance must improve.

* Eclipse consumes > 100% CPU when I have my CMake-project open. No
  background jobs are being run, the indexer has completed, but still
  the Eclipse process is hogging all the CPU. I'd love to produce a
  bugreport, but I simply don't know what to put in it.

* I tried importing the CMake-project inside a runtime Eclipse and
  debug it. This did not work since the runtime Eclipse dies with a
  OutOfMemory error while doing some decorator work.

* Should I just give up on having a single, large, Eclipse/CDT project
  with all the files in it? How large projects should CDT be capable
  of handling?

-- 
/Jesper