Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

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+1 to CLion. Vim is great for what it is-- if I need to make a small edit or even work on C code it does the job well and is very fast and efficient. But at the end of the day it's not a full blown IDE and as such is missing a graphical debugger and profiler, good configuration for interactively running unit tests, and complex refactoring tools.

CLion is pretty much the best C++ IDE I've found by a mile. Eclipse is so slow and terrible I won't even consider it. Visual Studio is amazing but Windows only and really heavyweight. VSCode, Atom, etc. aren't really "proper" IDEs. Then there's open source contenders like Jucipp which while very fast do lack a lot of the niceties of their paid competitors.

My only gripe with CLion is that it's CMake only. This limits its usefulness for Bazel or Autotools projects.

Clion added support for Makefile based projects back in July. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/makefiles-support.html

What are you missing in VSCode to make it a proper IDE?

VSCode gets the look right. Indeed, its look is fantastic. But it doesn't get the feel of vim right at all. My fingers speak vim and they know whether they're talking to vim or something hinky. So after a few days with VSC, I go back. Usually it has to do with ex mode which I power edit in a lot. But I do look at VSC every year or so and it gets better.

The lack of a built-in profiler was a big one for me (though this may have improved recently). I do like using external tools like Intel VTune or Morgan Stanley's XPedite but they're not great for the "quick profiling" you might do to test out various implementations of a function or component.

Maybe that's been added since I used it 1.5 years or so ago though.

Graphical debuggers, GUI tooling framework for MFC/UWP/WinUI, mixed mode debugging .NET/C++, navigation in binary libraries, architecture diagrams, graphical class navigation.

> Eclipse is so slow and terrible I won't even consider it.

Ironically it was a similar experience with InteliJ that made me love Eclipse again.

> Eclipse is so slow and terrible I won't even consider it

Very funny! On our codebase CLion is very, very, very slow.

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