Working with big projs in not so big comps

[Enrique]

Hi,

This is my first post in this forum. I have been programming with MS VC at my university, but I simply don't find it worth the money it costs. I have to say that I really appreciate your effort.

This said, I have some questions/problems/requests regarding the use of Dev-cpp when dealing with big projects (this is, 50 or 60 source files). For example the ogre engine (ogre.sourceforge.net)

1. Project folders.
  1.a) Moving several files at a time. Will dev-cpp be able to do it?
  1.a) Open folders. It seems that project folders are "opened by defauld". (By "open" I mean that you can see the names of the files inside them) When opening a project, all its folders are open (and all its files parsed - keep reading). The same happens when a file is drag'n'dropped to a folder - it opens (so if the folder had more than 15 files you can't see it any more-you have to scroll up and close it in order to add more. It was so frustrating that I ended editing the project file by hand). Why is this? Could you please turn off that behaviour, or add a checkbox for it in the config dialog?
  1.b) Subfolders. Are you planning to add support for them in the future? I think this could be done even preserving compatibility with the past (you use the '/' as a normal char in prev versions, and to indicate subfolders in the new one)

2. Conditional parsing. On the environment initialization,  *every* file is parsed for making syntax highlighting. This is a veeery slow task in my (no jokes please) AMD K6 II @ 350MHz. Is it possible to make dev-cpp parse "only browsed files"? Or even better "when opening the file's project folder/subfolder" (you see, I wasn't asking for keeping them closed just for fun:) )

Thanks a lot for your help.

[Enrique]

Of course, I meant

1.a) ,
1.b) and
1.c)

:P

[Yiannis Mandravellos]

Hi Enrique,

I 'll try to answer your questions though you haven't said what version of dev you 're using...
From what you write, I 'll assume you 're *not* using 4.9.7.0

1a) Yes, it will. It's not implemented yet.

1b) In version 4.9.7.0, the folders are not automatically expanded (opened) when you open your project. They 're only opened when either you explicitely click on a folder or drop a file on it.

1c) Subfolders are supported in 4.9.7.0 (unlimited nesting).

2) About parsing. On "environment initialization" (when dev-cpp starts that is) one of two things may happen: no parsing at all (of anything) or, if you 've enabled the code-completion cache, loading of the pre-parsed files cache. It is obvious that if this cache is to be loaded, the start-up time of dev-cpp increases (how much depends on your machine's speed).
When you open a project, its files are parsed. All of them. And, maybe, even more files than those in your project (global include files not already in the cache etc)... It depends on the settings found in "Tools/Editor Options/Class Browsing". Though, you have a very nice idea: parse files only "when opening the file's project folder/subfolder". Unfortunately this cannot be done. Not the way the parser is implemented now. You see, the parser is intelligent enough to see that file "A", that is currently being parsed, #includes file "B". Depending on the class browsing settings, the parser puts file "B" in a queue of to-be-parsed files and there's at least one perfectly good reason for this: inheritance. For code-completion to be of any real help, the parser needs to know as much as it can about a given class's inheritance tree and the only way to do it is to parse *all* the relevant files...
As you can see, the question comes down to whether you want features or speed. This is the trade-off... I hope some day, this parser becomes fast *and* feature-full ;)... But it ain't easy. C/C++ code parsing is really tough because of the free form of the language...

Thanks for your comments and I hope I 've cleared up some things here...

Yiannis.

[Enrique]

... I was not using the last version!! I feel stupid :P.

Thanks for everything!