[ale] best cross platform development evironment

Wed Nov 17 07:20:56 EST 2010

I was a professional C++ developer across 8+ different platforms for 
almost a decade (before moving into architecture roles).  Almost all our 
code was C++ including the GUI, app, and DB layers. In all the companies 
that I worked during that time, we used C++ libraries and tools for 
cross platform GUIs and network-based communications. We used CORBA 
(Iona Orbix), but these days I'd probably design a REST interface 
instead. You can build your own GUI/cross platform library ... or 
research which would be best for your needs and learn it.  I really 
enjoyed writing for Visix Galaxy and hated using Neuron Data tools.  
Today, I'd take a long look at Gtk+ and Qt. There are other options that 
are less well known.

      IDEs are for wimps, IMHO.

If you use VC++ as the main dev platform, it will be extremely difficult 
to learn which functions and methods are portable to other platforms.  
However, if you use any UNIX-like platform, the non-GUI code will be 95% 
portable to windows, mac, and 99.9% portable between UNIX-flavors.  For 
the first few months at least, please use an editor like `vi` and 
straight Makefiles. 4 months in, then go looking for an IDE. 
Freshmeat.net is a place to begin searching.

Port early AND often.  Where I worked, all code had to be compiled 
across all platforms before it was checked into the VCS.  Breaking a 
build for another developer - for any reason - was penalized heavily 
with extra grunt work that benefited the rest of the team.

Use version control for your code. You'll thank me later.  The few times 
that I didn't use a VCS because the project was tiny, I regretted it. I 
prefer using DVCS now, but have used SCCS, RCS, VSS, SVN, CVS. GIT is 
very popular, but the interfaces are clearly created by a kernel 
developer. BZR is usable by humans and has cross platform interfaces. 
The big complaint against BZR is speed when compared to GIT. Does it 
really matter if the interaction is 2x slower when it still finishes in 
less than 3 seconds for normal sized projects?

For a very light IDE - I use Geany on Linux. It understands 40+ 
different languages for syntax highlighting, tracking of functions and 
symbols.  For more options 
http://freshmeat.net/search?q=c%2B%2B+IDE&submit=Search

Of course, these are just my opinions and others will have learned 
different things from their different experiences.

On 11/16/2010 05:43 PM, Ron Frazier wrote:
> Frederick and Brian,
>
> Thanks for the info on these libraries.  I have looked at them 
> briefly, and plan to explore them in more depth.  Based on discussions 
> in this thread and some of my own research, I've decided to reverse my 
> prior plan and learn C++ instead of C#.  Either should be an 
> employable job skill.  I still like both languages from a technical 
> point of view.  I just need to get back in the groove after being away 
> from it for 15 years.  The following factors influenced my decision 
> (in no particular order).
>
> C++ has the following vs C#.
>
> 1) Less potential legal problems
> 2) More portability, maybe
> 3) Libraries available for garbage collection, databases, threads, etc.
> 4) Other libraries as mentioned in the posts below for various functions
> 5) Procedures and features to reduce memory leaks, pointer problems
> 6) The ability to create a stand alone executable, without using a VM
> 7) Possibly better performance
> 8) Many open source projects use C++, which I might like to contribute 
> my new skills to
>
> I bought Bjarne Stroustrup's book - Programming Principles and 
> Practice using C++.  It looks pretty good.  This one is oriented 
> toward 1st semester students, which will be good for me since I've 
> been away from this task for quite a while.  If, I'm aggressive, I may 
> be able to finish the "basics" in this book (1000+ pages worth) in a 
> few months and move on to more advanced things.  The book uses MS 
> Visual C++ as the development environment, so I can use that when I'm 
> dual booting into Windows.  However, they point out that you can 
> compile C++ on many systems, and gives a little info about compiling 
> using GCC in Linux.  They use a 3rd party GUI library rather than 
> Winforms, and I think their code is portable across various systems.
>
> If anyone has advice for setting up an IDE and compiler on the Linux 
> side of the fence (Ubuntu 10.04), I'd be glad to hear it.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>
> At 11/10/2010 01:18 AM -0500, Frederick wrote:
>> Some other C++ libraries are 
>> <http://www.cs.wustl.edu/%7Eschmidt/ACE-overview.html>ACE and 
>> <http://www.boost.org/>Boost, which I have both used.  Apache has 
>> <http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/>Xerces for C++, and even a 
>> <http://ws.apache.org/axis/cpp/index.html>C++ web services 
>> implementation (which I have not used).
>>
>> On 11/09/2010 09:06 PM, Brian Pitts wrote:
>>>
>>> On 11/09/2010 12:53 PM, Ron Frazier wrote:
>>>>
>>>> OK.  You guys, along with the inventor of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, 
>>>> make a
>>>> strong case for avoiding encumbered languages.  I MIGHT consider 
>>>> learning
>>>> C++ for my own purposes, assuming I can get good libraries for garbage
>>>> collection (apparently available), threads, GUI, databases, 
>>>> cryptography /
>>>> security, file operations, printing, user I/O, USB, sound, and
>>>> sockets.
>>>
>>>
>>> Have you looked at QT and kdelibs?
>>>
>>> <http://qt.nokia.com/products/library/modular-class-library>http://qt.nokia.com/products/library/modular-class-library 
>>>
>>> http://api.kde.org/4.0-api/kdelibs-apidocs/index.html
>>>
>
>
> --------------------------
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want 
> to call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate 
> energy mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very 
> quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier
>
> 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT c3energy.com
>
>
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