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Comment by erostrate | Hacker News Reader

JetBrains products are very powerful, well designed, customizable, and overall awesome in my experience (ReSharper and PyCharm). Looking forward to this! And really hoping they will have a free edition, although I doubt it.

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CLion isn't all that great. It still has major issues analyzing a lot of C++ code (false positive red squiggly lines everywhere), almost 1.5 years after the initial annoncement.

Although C# should be a much easier language to deal with, so this one might turn out better.

They already analyze C# well because of their other product (Resharper).

ReSharper C++ (why they didn't call it RePlusPlus I'll never know) is also sorely lacking in basic functionality. Compared to opening a C# project with R#, opening a C++ project with R#++ and none of the refactoring keyboard shortcuts work ... Visual Studio just feels dead.

(I love my ReSharper Ultimate license, and R#++ helps to fill in a lot of Visual Studio's blanks as far as C++ goes, but really it needs to spend another six months incubating.)

You should try Visual Assist (http://wholetomato.com/) in case you haven't heard of it.

I'm pretty happy with ReSharper++'s functionality (although refactoring beyond rename seems really unreliable); but the performance is abysmal. I don't know how many hours I've spent watching the "ReSharper is thinking..." popup because I edited a resource file or something. If the next release doesn't improve things dramatically I'm going back to visual assist.

I'd bet the main problem is that they don't use C++ much themselves internally. Trying to develop software that you don't use in anger yourself is usually a recipe for bugs and missed requirements.

> I'd bet the main problem is that they don't use C++ much themselves internally

I doubt they use all the languages their IDEs support internally - there's just too many! (Java, PHP, Javascript, Python, C/C++, Ruby, Obj-C). The problems are probably because CLion is one of their least mature products.

I think it's a combination of C# being much easier to parse and Resharper being a mature product.

It seems like they've made the classic mistake with C++ parsers of reinventing the wheel. I have never used an IDE which is capable of correctly parsing all the C++ code I've used.

The notable exception is anything based on clang, which is usually flawless (as you would expect). If CLion had been based on clang then they would have saved themselves a lot of work and ended up with a better performing product. Presumably the reason they didn't had something to do with licensing.

Are there better IDE options out there for C++ than CLion? I agree that it's far from perfect, but it's still a lot more effective and helpful than my other alternative, vim.

I bought PyCharm when it was on sale (two years back?) and ended up not using it as it was too slow. So... while powerful, they are not always the best solution.

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