Optimal Eclipse CDT (C++) experience in March of 2010

Question

I am a student who will be using C++ next quarter. I really enjoyed using the Galileo release of Eclipse with Java and I would like to continue using Eclipse for for C++ development.

I am now experimenting with C++ development on Eclipse. I am running Eclipse 3.5 SR2 with CDT 6.02. My operating system is Windows 7 and I have installed MinGW-5.1.6. Version 6.3 of GDB is installed.

I have it compiling and stepping through code. However, I have the suspicion that I'm just crawling along and have yet to "shift the car out of first gear". I've spent about a week poking around on the Web to learn what constitutes and "optimal" C++ Eclipse experience. In particular, I'm interested in round-tripping with UML and unit testing.

My exploration of the Web became an archeological dig. I turned up how-to articles from 2003, alternative MinGW distros, references to plugins, dead-links, more references to plugins, passionate discussions on gdb bugs, and more references to plugins.

I no longer have any idea what might constitute an optimal C++ Eclipse environment. Would members of the community like to weigh-in on what they consider to be the current optimal experience for C++ development using Eclipse?

Answer 1

CDT 7.0 (out now in June) will have a preview of Codan, a static analysis framework for C/C++. It will highlight logic errors for you in "realtime", i.e. without having to wait for compilation. (It doesn't have very many checkers at the moment, but the number is growing, and you can also implement checkers of your own.)

CDT 7.0 also features a new debugger contributed by Nokia (called "EDC"), which allows debugging without relying on 3rd party tools such as gdb. This will also allow debugging of Visual Studio binaries, something which previously has been impossible.

The "Open Type" and "Open Resource" commands of CDT (and JDT also, BTW) is something I always miss when I have to do stuff in Visual Studio. Being able to locate any type by incrementally typing a part of its name is very practical, and Visual Studio has nothing close to it.

Integration with unit-testing is still missing, though. Not sure why that hasn't caught on.

Answer 2

Here is what I ended up with for a C++ development environment on Windows 7.

• Compiler & libraries
• Nuwen MinGW Distro.
• It includes the Boost libraries which are necessary for the unit testing framework.
• A big thanks to Stephan T. Lavavej for making this distribution available.
• Debugger
• The GNU debugger as built for Windows.
• I copied the file gdb.exe into my C:\MinGW\bin folder and it worked well.
• Thanks for Equation Solution for providing win32 and win64 binaries of the GDB executable.
• IDE
• Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers.
• Unit testing framework
• CUTE (C++ Automated Unit Testing Easier).
• Download the Eclipse plug-in using Eclipse’s software installation . Add this URL to “Available Software Sites”: http://ifs.hsr.ch/cute/updatesite.
• The CUTE Website has excellent installation and usage instructions.

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I failed to find a round-trip modeling tool that was useful to me. Exploring free UML tools was like wandering through a city that had been bombed. Dozens of projects stood in various states of usability. Some projects were clearly active, some were clearly abandoned, but most were somewhere in between. Visio continues to be my pragmatic choice for creating UML models.