Re: [Flightgear-devel] Linux development...

[Curtis L. O. <cur...@fl...>]

Dave Culp wrote:
> Firstly, thanks for taking on the 2D panel clipping.  That's been sorely 
> needed for a few years now.
>
> As for IDE's, I think most developers here don't use one.

I've always used emacs + make.  I've done some windows based projects 
using IDE's (both MS and Borland) and frankly, I just don't see that 
they gain you all that much over simpler approaches, but I don't feel 
like they are a hindrance either.  I think it just boils down to knowing 
how to use  your tools effectively and choosing the ones you prefer.  (I 
don't want to start a political discussion here.)

I've always edited my files in emacs which allows me to open up multiple 
windows on multiple files like an ide would.  Then I run "make" in a 
text window.  There are all sorts of little trade offs between 
make/emacs and an ide.  An ide can provide a number of little 
conveniences, but have you ever had the need to do some development or 
debugging on a client's remote system?  Some systems are large enough 
and complicated enough that you can't just email the client a new .exe, 
it makes more sense to log in and work remotely.

Some of the differences stem from the unix philosophy/culture versus the 
windows philosophy/culture.  Unix tends to favor a collection of tools, 
each tool doing it's particular task *really* well, but it's up to the 
developer/user to connect these smaller tools together to accomplish 
larger tasks.  Windows tends to a favor giant monolithic apps that do 
everything in one big .exe.

So in unix I  choose to use emacs to edit my source files because it is 
an incredibly powerful and flexible editor, and I would choose 
gcc/g++/make to compile my code because I just love RMS so much.  There 
is gdb and valgrind and others for debugging, there is cvs for source 
code version management, there are the autotools (ack!), and a variety 
of other little utils (awk, grep, perl, etc.) that you can pull in to do 
different little tasks.

In windows you typically get this all rolled together in one giant app.  
But each individual piece of the app might not be quite as full featured 
and flexible as the individual tools you would find in unix.

That said, 99.9% of popular unix software is ported to windows so a unix 
head stuck on a windows box can still survive and be relatively happy.

Sorry, I'm just rambling now ... better get off my butt and go to work 
here ... :-)

Curt.

-- 
Curtis Olson        http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program  http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project  http://www.flightgear.org
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