Thursday, December 14, 2006

Porting C/C++ Development from Visual Studio to Eclipse: Does that make any sense?

This link is a long step-by-step tutorial on IBM Developer Works re porting C/C++ projects from Visual Studio .NET to Eclipse. You might wonder, as I did, why anyone who was using Visual Studio .NET would be tempted to port their development to a Java hosted environment to compile .NET code. I believe there is no good reason.

The article actually confirms my view , pointing out on several occasions that the Eclipse platform is indeed the wrong place for Windows development: "Neither Eclipse nor GDB understand the debugging information generated by Microsoft compilers. As a result, it is a challenge to select CDT as a full-time development environment for Windows development. However, you can use Debugging Tools for Windows for debugging side by side with Eclipse as a development environment." Ugh!

Eclipse CDT, as the article also points out, knows nothing about resources.

In other words, you'd be unlikely to ever migrate from VS.NET to Eclipse.

The article misses the opportunity to explain what Windows coding you would use the CDT for: porting code from other platforms to Windows when you don't have access to Visual Studio. That makes sense.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am currently working on adding support for the Windows debugger with the CDT for next June's release. It'll make a lot more sense then.

One potential batch of users, people making games using DirectX. Also I have a lot of embedded developers building simulations on Windows but using the CDT for their target work.