Tenacious C shows you what points to what | Hacker News Reader

Tenacious C shows you what points to what

tenaciousc.com

26 pointsgaius18 comments

Toolchain: MinGW, gcc 3.5, gdb 5.2

Yet it only runs on Windows? Thanks, but I do virtually all my C programming on Linux. The only thing Windows is useful for is to cross compile to other targets (it's usually more work to set up Linux to cross compile to a target).

Why anyone would write C on Windows for Windows I have no clue.

Their front-end is written in C#, I guess that's what they were most familiar with building GUIs in. Perhaps there will be a Mono version in future.

I just don't understand it, in this post for example http://tenaciousc.com/?p=1787 he is talking about poking around in the kernel, but then he develops a Windows-only C IDE? Qt is perfect, I don't understand what the problem is.

Is it that hard to imagine that maybe he's primarily a Windows user and has previous experience in C# and not Qt?

Hm, to me it is. If he knows C, he will know C++ too. Qt makes cross platform development trivial. Linux is a C stronghold. He knows the in&out of the Linux kernel, knows gdb and the gcc. He is making a C IDE, so why not program it in C with GTK+ if not Qt. Yes, all that stuff makes it hard to understand to be Windows-only.

> If he knows C, he will know C++ too.

What?

The two languages are only barely related as used in industry. Tons of people use C every day who wouldn't think about touching C++.

  C++ is rarely used compared to straight C in:
  OSes 
  Micro-controllers 
  Libraries

Lots of users of C also think C++ is a horrid mistake for many application development efforts (hard to find engineers who do C++ right enough vs most other languages).

And those same C people have rarely programmed in GUI environments as well.

I agree that C++ is horrible, but I was under the impression that everyone who knows C would have at least learned C++ before discarding it, making it possible to at least use C++ libraries.

Naw, tons of EE's know enough C to not have to do assembler, but don't get C++ at all. Lots of other people know C because they do extensions for their preferred language. Lastly people know enough C++ to know they don't know C++ well enough to release software in it.

C++ is vastly different from C. I know C, yet I don't know C++.

When I need a GUI I still use Tcl/Tk, nowt wrong wi' the old ways and it works a treat on Windows too.

For linux there is always DDD

Eclipse has very sweet gdb integration, and is probably the best C/C++ IDE for Linux if people can get over the fact that it's written in Java and uses up gigs of ram.

Nothing on Linux beats the C++ parser that Eclipse has (I tried everything and it feels like programming in the stone age unless it knows how to interpret templates and go to def/go to usages works). Heck, even on Windows probably only Visual Studio beats it, thanks to being written in speedier native code and already supporting C++0x intellisense.

It's not as useful for C though since there's plenty of other IDEs that can do macro unfolding and if that's not even needed then just using your favorite text editor + cscope provides a fast way of traversing a call graph.

That being said C/C++ IDEs are still decades behind Java or C#. Where's our dozens of automated refactorings that other languages have?

It's not a matter of IDEs having to "catch up". C and C++ weren't designed with the constraint that they had to be highly amenable to static analysis, so there's quite simply less that automated refactoring tools can know they can safely change without breaking anything.

DDD is suffering badly from lack of love... I fired it up on my Debian dev box the other day and it was painful to use, so unresponsive. A real shame, I remember when it was the power tool of choice. GDB + Emacs is very usable.

This would be great, if I could use it for Mac or Linux. There's already a kickass C editor for Windows - Visual Studio. Meanwhile, on Linux where I'd prefer to do all my C programming, there's a host of half-baked alternatives. Currently I'm using Eclipse, after loading Emacs up with CEDET made it intolerably slow. Qt Creator is great, but afaik only for C++.

Alas, if they had built with Qt/C++ instead of .NET I would probably have bought the product in a heartbeat.

Have to agree. While I like open source, I too will spend money in a heartbeat on good tools.

Not bad. He should save the projects (.proj) files in textual format, it would allow people to merge them when using version control system (p4, git, svn, etc.)

For those wondering about the name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenacious_D

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