IKOS: Static analyzer for C/C++ based on the theory of Abstract Interpretation

I will never understand why clang and GCC extensions are considered part of C or C++, while other compilers aren't.

Refactoring exists for 20 years in Visual Studio with plugins like Visual Assist.

The tools I mentioned as ahead of their time allowed for a Lisp Machines or Smalltalk like experience for C++, respectively.

Once you have

   #ifdef FOO
   ...
   #else
   ...
   #endif

You have to do that even for such simple things as syntax coloring. Now, you say “I simply parse both branches, check what things they define, somehow merge the two, and we’re good to go”. That won’t work, as the not taken branch(es) need not contain valid C/C++, and their validity may depend on whether other branches are taken.

the preprocessor also has concatenation (https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/Concatenation.html). That makes writing a refactoring tool as good as impossible (for example, how do you rename quit_command to commandExit in the example on that page?)

Now, lots of code is fairly reasonable in its use of the preprocessor, but writing a reliable tool is a lot harder, if it’s possible at all, than with Java.

In the C++ world, although I am not experienced enough, so take my words with a pinch of salt, there is more fragmentation for the tooling part. AFAIK, there is not a single "community" saying "this is the recommended way". Scala had (and still has) for a long time a very similar issue: lots of tools popping up left and right, lots of "experiments" become production-ready stuff. Then after several years, they decided to face the issue and proposed a centralized place (scalacenter) to offer some sort of "official" support. It's not "finished" yet, but it's a good move into the right direction which will only help adopt the language.

My experience so far with C++ has been a little bit different: you have a lot of different tools, very good ones, so you're undecided which one to use, but finally thanks to the books/resources you read, you'll eventually stick to some of them: it's decentralized and community-based (like other languages) vs [very] centralized (go/rust). It's two different philosophies, and from my understanding, C++ tries very hard NOT to enforce anything on the developers, which can be a burden for newcomers because there is just too much to learn. A stupid example: I use clang-format/clang-tidy: which style am I supposed to use to format the code? I am freaking new, "just pick whatever you want", but hey the default is "none".

It goes against the principle of "crash-only recovery" to try to recover from a bad state instead of being able to start over from the beginning.

Fair enough. I did say "some of the best debuggers I've used". I've never used Common Lisp. I have no idea what the debugging experience is like on it.

Incidentally, I don't find edit & continue to be a terribly useful feature.

>I'm not even sure they've caught up on class redefinition and instance upgrade at runtime yet, which has been supported in CL since the 1980s.

That has nothing to do with the tooling, though. C++ just doesn't support those features. You also say "caught up" as if committee members had been trying to add those features to C++ but just hadn't been able to. It's much more likely that there hasn't been enough (or any) interest to add them.