Eclipse IDE for C++

I’ve been working with Eclipse for at least 2 years. When I just learned of Eclipse I was mostly programming C / C++ using Visual Studio 6, which I bought zillion years ago.

Eclipse was a whole new world to me, offering all the convenient tools (like finding references, go to class, etc) a Java programmer could need. 

All my hobby projects are mostly written in C / C++ using the old Visual Studio version. It worked well, but after getting used to Eclipse, going back to Visual Studio 6 was like going back to the stone age. Of course, at this time Visual Studi0 7 is already out-dated; If I’m not mistaken, version 9 or 10 is around the corner.

Good news though, there is an Eclipse version where you can develop in C / C++ using the Eclipse IDE. It is available here. You have to use it in combination with a compiler. To get started, I have used MinGW which is easy to set up. Grab that from here

The good thing is, once MinGW was set up correctly, Eclipse automatigically found it (I bet it used the PATH variable) and you could try to compile your first “Hello world” program. 

My first impressions are good, the C++ IDE is actually like the Java variant with all the handy tools.  The performance is good, it works good, It has Doxygen built in for you. All in all I am quite satisfied. Also, I am quite happy that it exists, since Dev-Cpp and Code::Blocks is not being updated. I thought Dev-Cpp had a lot of potential, especially with the built-in packages.

If you ever consider to use an IDE (you don’t need it!) for writing C / C++ programs, you should definately give the Eclipse IDE for C++ a try.

Comments

  1. I have also been using eclipse or netbeans for C/C++ stuff 🙂 basically the “refactor” thing is something VS.net is still missing I guess 🙂

    Performance of eclipse is good on Pentium-4 level computers, netbeans requires a little more powerful computer though.

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