Speaking as a user of Carbide, rather than one of its developers,
here are some specifics from me:
Project layout:
-- Symbian has very specific ideas about project filesystem layout,
as does Eclipse, and the two are fundamentally incompatible.
Specifically:
-- Project files in
Symbian-land are stored deep in a subdirectory, whilst Eclipse insists
that .project and .cproject are at the outermost point which contains any
relevant source code or headers.
-- Several Symbian projects may
have the same 'outermost point' and thus conflict in Eclipse-land.
I know that the Carbide team
and you yourself Doug have been fighting the Eclipse establishment to
relax these rules, to little avail. I know you have hopes for EclipseFS.
But meanwhile, this is responsible for a majority of the complexity.
-- The nature of projects themselves are a problem. Why shouldn't you
just be able to work directly on Symbian project files? Why the need to
create an Eclipse project? The Carbide team has done a great job of hiding
it well using a slick import wizard, but it's still wrong.
-- And what's a workspace? Eclipse seems to want to copy, or at least
link, my code into its own directory. Why? All my code has a fixed
location in Symbian-land.
Builds:
The Carbide team have jumped through some big hoops to get the
Symbian build system to play nicely with CDT, and on the whole, it now
works well. But there are is still untidiness round the edges:
-- CDT can't cope properly with multi-line error messages emitted by
compilers. In C++ code full of templates, that leads to despair and
hopelessness.
-- Build configurations are important for Symbian. In CDT they are
hidden away. And, although Carbide could expose that feature more
obviously in the UI, it still might not be smooth in terms of the settings
which applied globally versus as part of a build configuration.
-- There's nothing Carbide or CDT can do about this, but Symbian
builds are slow. I think there's a perception they're slower in the
IDE (sometimes this is true, but either way, it's the perception that
counts). The whole CDT experience seems hugely less slick when builds
always take 5-20 minutes. It's not related to complexity, but it is
probably one reason why people are put off Carbide.
Indexer:
-- The indexer is *great*. But...
-- Often things go grey when you've made a mistake, but there's no
way to find out the error message until you spend 10 minutes building the
project with a compiler. It just seems weird to a user to have two
different things parsing the code. Why does the IDE know I've done
something wrong but it won't tell me what? Seems weird to an
end-user.
-- Likewise, you have to fiddle with two sets of macro definitions,
include paths etc. The Carbide team has done a good job of hiding this but
it's not transparent.
-- Unfortunately the indexer still isn't quite perfect. For example
the call hierarchy sometimes just stops. Which is a shame because when it
works, it's terrific. But the fact that you can't quite trust its results
makes everything seem complex.
Launches:
-- Launch configurations are useful. All the (fairly recent)
efforts to hide/automate them are also useful. But they still seem to
lurk as something sinister behind the scenes which users eventually will
have to understand. The need for them is not obvious in
Symbian-land.
-- The debug view is a pain. You seem to have to click in it before
you can use debug keys, or at least it's possible for it to lose focus.
Debugging should be a global operation, not stuck in some funny little
pane. This may be Carbide-specific; I don't know.
Eclipse runes:
-- "Hard to learn" - to be a confident user of Carbide, you have to
understand a perspective, a view, an editor, a plugin, a workspace, a
project, a build configuration, a launch configuration, and probably a bit
more. All of these are Eclipse terminology.
-- You just don't want to have to learn 10 more concepts when you're
already struggling with the Symbian weirdness!
-- I imagine most Carbide users need to install Subversive pretty
quickly. Then not only do they have to struggle with understanding
plugins, update sites, etc. but they also have to contend with the Eclipse
IP process, or specifically its implications meaning the key bits of
Subversive are squirreled away on someone else's website. Sigh. It's
enough to drive me mad and I must have installed it a dozen
times. Still, things are improving in that specific area now.
-- Eclipse keystrokes differ from the rest of the world's.
-- Carbide's greatest value is in the indexer features hidden behind
obscure keystrokes. Sadly I think most Carbide users don't get far enough
to learn F3, ctrl-o, ctrl-alt-h, ctrl-t, etc.
I use Eclipse, Carbide and CDT all the time. For me, the power of the
indexer makes it all worthwhile. But I must admit, if I were to try to
create a simple IDE for Symbian beginners, I probably wouldn't start with
Eclipse!
Adrian
On 11 Dec 2009, at 23:09, Doug Schaefer wrote:
Instead of talking in generalities, I'd prefer
to talk with specifics. Saying Carbide is hard to learn, what exactly
about it is it hard to learn? Is it things in the CDT or Eclipse
platform or things Carbide has added on top? Is it creating projects? Is
it setting up builds? Is it launching debug sessions? Is it creating
files? Is it too many choices? Would adding wizards in strategic
places make the CDT easier to learn?
Most of the complaints on usability with Eclipse I've heard are
really complaints from users who find IDEs complex in general. Is Qt
Creator really that less complex than the CDT? What about Qt
Creator makes it easier to learn. And why don't we invest in the CDT to
make it equivalent?
Doug.
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 4:47 PM, Pawel Piech
<pawel.piech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
All we've done so far is rather
vendor-specific. What we would like to see in CDT is the ability
to isolate and turn off various features using capabilities: e.g.
build, static analysis, debuggers, etc. To accomplish this we
would likely need to look at dependencies between these various CDT
components and see if we can isolate them better. However, we
haven't invested any time in this yet.
-Pawel
Paul
Beusterien wrote:
Hi Pawel,
Thanks for the response. Are there any
available artifacts from the stripped-down IDE investigation?
Any effort estimates?
Regards,
Paul
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Pawel Piech
<pawel.piech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Paul,
Complexity is a
common complaint about Eclipse-based tools (not especially limited
to C - development tools). I don't know of any efforts to
overhaul the UI, but I expect that there would be a lot of
interest out there for it. For Wind River's part, we are
investigating creating a stripped-down version of the IDE
specifically targeted at Debugging use cases, but I know we won't
be able to get far without support from the
community.
Cheers,
Pawel
Paul Beusterien wrote:
Hi CDT community,
I'm responsible for the tools
strategy at the
Symbian Foundation. Like the Eclipse
Foundation, Symbian depends on the contributions from open
source communities to drive its mobile device platform
technology forward.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts
about one of the challenges we're facing with
understanding/determining the direction for Symbian C++
development tools.
There are two open source communities
vying for the Symbian C++ developer -
Qt Creator and Carbide (based on CDT).
Carbide's investments have been primarily focused
on adding features to give more power to device creators. While
it has become very feature-full, it has also become very complex
and hard to learn, especially for developers that want to just
build simple mobile apps.
Qt Creator is a targeted C++
development environment with a big emphasis on usability.
For example, it has rigorous hurdles to add a button or menu
item. Now, it is rapidly adapting to improve its mobile
development capabilities.
Thus, we currently have a
fragmented C++ developer story at Symbian.
It is
unlikely that Qt Creator will ever support the rich set of
features that Carbide currently provides to the power
user.
Are there any initiatives will enable CDT based
IDEs to lower its learning curve and better support the needs of
a simple C++ application
developer?
Thanks,
Paul
--
Paul
Beusterien
Development Tools Manager
Symbian
Foundation
Foster City, California USA
twitter:
paulbeusterien
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