Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevinSuttle | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a C/C++ dev, so forgive my ignorance. Is Visual Studio [Community] not the standard anymore?

On Windows Visual Studio is still very much the default in the context of Windows only developers.

Some people/projects prefer to use MinGW-W64 builds with an IDE such as Code::Blocks, CodeLite, QtCreator, etc.

With VS Community coming out last year it has given more people/projects access to a full Visual Studio environment which is very nice IMHO. I have not seen many FOSS projects switch to using Visual Studio and MSVC (the short name for the Visual C++ Compiler) over MinGW-W64 though. I suspect this is just down to "if it ain't broke" though more than anything.

I use QtCreator: It's pretty solid and has good and fast code completion.

QtCreator on OSX has proven buggy for me in the past. I tried to give it another try recently, and it depended on a version of Xcode that is 2 version numbers ago. I'd have to edit the various installation assertions myself to get it to find and use modern Xcode.

Great thing about Qt Creator is that it can use clang for parsing the code, so the completions and highlighted errors tend to be very accurate.

VSC is really, really great. Meanwhile, the previous free VS's were not as full-featured, none of them run on OSX or Linux, and some Windows users still prefer GCC for various reasons.

Your comment suggests that current VS runs on OSX? I'll have to check that out!

Visual Studio does not run on anything other than Windows.

However there is an Atom-like code editor called Visual Studio Code that is multi-platform running on Windows, OS X and Linux. I believe VSCode is built on the same platform (Electron?) as Atom although I might be wrong.

That they're both open source editors built on Electron is just about the only thing that Atom and VSCode have in common.

Yes, I never meant to imply they are the same, just that VSCode is "Atom-like" in that it is a code editor built using the same core framework as Atom.

Sorry I was vague. I was including VSC in "them".

Not if you intent your code to be portable.

The devs here use VS to write C++ targeted to an embedded device running VxWorks. Their code may or may not be "portable," but it's not targeted to Windows.

Why not? You can develop on Windows, don't include windows.h or put platform-specific things in #ifdefs, make use of all the awesomeness that is Visual Studio (potentially improved with ViEmu, Visual Assist and Resharper), then add a CMakelists at the end to compile for other platforms. Yes the first time you'll probably have to tweak a bit to get it to compile on other platforms, but that's loads better than suffering through gdb and ctags for months.

(I have used RedHat 4 back when it was new and fresh and have been using Vim for 15+ years; I have written vim scripts of 100 lines and more. Just to say, I'm not some greenhorn who's never known anything but an IDE. I still think developing C++ using Visual Studio is an order of magnitude better than any alternative.)

Experience has taught me that C++ compilers generally don't agree on the code they will accept: incomplete implementation of the standard (Visual C++ 2010 partial C++11 support), different non-standard header files (string.h vs memory.h), different warnings ( "possible loss of data" ), different error message conditions ( "not all control paths return a value" ). I find it a lot easier not having to support several compilers, especially if Visual Studio's is one of them.

If the Visual Studio compiler was able to run on many platforms and target those platforms, it could definitely be a choice, as it compiles fast and generates fast code. However, for the moment, g++ allows me to ensure that my project properly builds for all desktop platforms, without having to setup compilation-dedicated virtual machines or worse, a jenkins build server ...

How are you going to avoid breaking things if you can't cross-compile before committing ?

Sure, there are some differences in what compilers accept in terms of bleeding edge features. I've never found it an issue to keep within a subset that works everywhere; we're not talking about cases where you need to support VS6, obviously. And there are always compatibility shims in boost for many things.

"How are you going to avoid breaking things if you can't cross-compile before committing ?"

Depends on the workflow. If you cannot afford to break builds, you need to push changes through a staging layer, which will then (in large scale setups like that) also run tests etc. If it's just a few people, your build server will catch it. If it's just me, who cares that it breaks on another platform - I'll have to fix it myself anyway. As long as you do somewhat regular integration, obviously.

There is no silver bullet. But when it comes to giving up the great efficiency gains that come from a great IDE like Visual Studio, or having to fumble with the toolchain a bit to integrate better - it's an easy choice for me. Plus having a project that compiles with multiple compilers keeps you honest about standards conformance and portability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com