Struggling with Eclipse CDT

I just spent a frustrating day trying to get Eclipse CDT set up to work on cSuneido (C++).

I've tried this several times in the past but always had problems and given up.

Every time a new version of Eclipse comes out I read about the improvements in the CDT (C/C++ Development Tooling) project and I feel guilty that I'm not using it and embarrassed that I'm too stupid to set it up.

Surely if I just devoted some time to it I could get it working. Maybe, but a day wasn't enough time, and I'm not sure how many days I can stand banging my head against the wall on it.

I realize that a portable C++ IDE is a tough problem. C++ is a gnarly language, and there are multiple versions of multiple compilers. A good IDE has to actually understand the language, which means it has to deal with all the intricacies of C++. I'm sympathetic.

But when I take a clean install of MinGW GCC (one of the supported compilers), and a clean install of Eclipse Juno CDT, and let it create a sample "hello world" project, I'd expect it to work. Not for me. It took me a couple of hours to get rid of the errors in this 10 line project. And even after all that, I was no further ahead than when I started. I just thrashed around with the myriad settings until some combination worked. No doubt most of my thrashing made things worse and just muddied the waters, but what else can you do?

The problems were mostly related to getting the right include paths. That seems like a straightforward problem, that should have a straightforward solution. But there are about four different places where you can set up include directories, and at least two different "auto discovery" systems that try to do it for you. And it's not enough to give c:/mingw/include, that would be way too simple. Instead you have to give every sub-directory that mingw happens to use, most of which are under the lib directory for some reason.

It was doubly frustrating because the project would "build" and produce a runnable executable, all while showing major errors.

Searching the web wasn't much help. Lots of other people have similar problems, although mostly with older versions of Eclipse and CDT so the settings they talk about no longer even exist.

There is an "indexer" which also gives compile type errors, plus multiple "builders", including "managed" ones, and ones that use your makefiles, and ones that generate makefiles. I couldn't tell whether errors were coming from the indexer, or something calling the actual GCC compiler, or from linking, or who knows where.

Eventually I got hello world to build and not show any errors so I moved on to Suneido, albeit with a certain amount of trepidation. I managed to get the include directories sorted out without too much trouble since I had a vague idea of which areas to semi-randomly play with the settings.

Nevertheless, several times I had to exit completely out of Eclipse because it got into seemingly infinite loops of building the project over and over. I don't know what triggered this or how to avoid it.

By the end of the day I managed to get rid of all the actual errors, although there are still a ton of warnings. Part of the problem is that once you have an error, it may not go away even if you fix the problem. I spent all my time running Clean and Build and re-indexing in attempts to figure out if I had fixed the problem or not.

A bunch of the warnings were from functions that weren't returning values. This weren't bugs, they were calling functions that never returned (e.g. threw exceptions or exited). The functions were marked with __attribute((noreturn)) and this works fine in GCC. But not in CDT. I found an Eclipse bug for this and left a comment, but I hadn't been able to isolate a simple test case so, predictably, the response was less than satisfying.

(Note: The Suneido C++ code builds fine with both GCC and Visual C++ using make)

I really wanted this to work. I am quite happy with Eclipse with my jSuneido Java code. I would really like to have better navigation and refactoring tools for C++. But even if I could get it working without tearing all my hair out, I have zero confidence that it's going to be a stable platform for development. All I can envision are things breaking randomly and unpredictably with cryptic errors.

I don't blame the CDT developers. They've got a tough job and I'm sure it would have taken them minutes to sort out what I flailed on for a day. But in the end, that doesn't help me get my work done.

Maybe I'll look at the latest NetBeans - I haven't tried it lately. Of course, I'm even less familiar with NetBeans than I am with Eclipse, which doesn't bode well!