Dear all.
please keep calm and continue debugging ;-)
You know, everyone here is right with fair remarks, but we are all wrong too.
Most important, we develop CB, aka an IDE, that means, not the compiler, not the debugger. BUT ... ( I will come to the but shortly). For
convenience on windows we ship the MinGw package (which is a port of gcc, but it brings also problems), as mentioned we
could switch too TDM. However it seems TDM John" is unreachable (which probably means he is busy with other things) and the TDM package is also getting outdated (it is at gcc 5.1.0), so it seems we might loose this option too (note that this is the compiler we use to build the nightly builds).
Let me first explain how I use CB, I always build it from svn, and I use it on linux (I boot up windows for 2 things, installing a game (and with some luck even play that game), and building nightlies). As such on linux I have to install the compiler, debugger myself, which is very easy to do (upgrading a compiler however is not).
I also sometimes get lost with the "enable scripts" versus do not enable the scripts but have a gdb-python pair.
And yes me too, I hardly need a debugger.
It is a pity indeed that gdb does not have such things build in (I myself can get angry on that, but I will spare you my rant).
FIRST CONCLUSION : many people have asked about this, so I think it deserves a link on our homepage to an up to date dedicated page on our wiki. Where everything is clearly explained on how to do it (with example of code snippets/programs, so the reader can verify he gets similar results).
SECOND CONCLUSION : we need to start deciding what "convenience" package to ship in the next release.
Now let me address the BUT. The customer is always right! As good as our CB is, what counts is the user experience, no discussion about that, period. We can point to windows, gdb, python whatsoever. We need to at least propose a "recipe" to get to a good user experience (and we can do such thing a little bit with our convenience package. The user use the IDE for 2 things at minimum:
The fact that the user used to have an expensive MS Visual Studio is a non argument. It is not the MSVS user experience that counts in this discussion it is OUR CB experience that matters.
It is the total user experience that counts, and will make a happy user, or aan user which decides to drop CB and look further.
Imagine you have a nice app on your phone, but the backend it talks too really sucks, no matter how nice and shiny and performant that app might be (even assume it is bug free), the experience will be crap due to that backend, and the user will drop it and look for other alternatives.
I have been evangelizing CB a lot in the past, I still do, but I an giving fair information, because if I do not from the start, in the end I end up like a fool, and let me tell you why, again it is all about user experience, and these areas where I have to say upfront the state of the functionality (or lack of current state) are in order of what I have see from people complaining or in the end not willing to use CB (despite of all the other great features it has):
- code completion <== we loose big time here wrt competition
- refactoring
- debugger
As long as the first 2 are in the current state, I noticed it is nearly impossible to convince for example an Eclipse user to even consider CB :-(
And yes I could try to improve it myself, but our current completion engine is dead, it can not solve the problems anymore, we need a different approach, and we have someone kindly working on an alternative one, and I am thinking of having a nightly (separate) build with it, so we can have more feedback, but even then it is 1 person at this moment so his time is also limited.
So yes the more people who can help out, test, provide patches, would be very nice. That's the good thing about open source, but it is also the downside, if nearly nobody steps up to help out things start to go slower and slower. And I have to pleed guilty myself, I still get up to the project management part of CB, the nightly builds but my commits have also been very low the last 2 years, because my spare time is a scarce resource.
So to all, please be constructive, though your statements might all be 100% correct, we need to aim for a good user experience, and try to bring that, not by saying we are only this, or that is not our problem. We need to look at the bigger picture.
PROPOSAL:
- this thread consists out of many suggestions, let's try them out
- use a nightly build and install TDM-GCC 5.1.0 package
- install python
- verify if it works
- let's discuss the problems in a positive way
- so we can end up with hopefully a working solution
- document the solution and give it a clear spot on our homepage
- in case we end up with a good result, as far as I am concerned (but I can't decide on just by myself) this could be the trigger for a new release (based upon whatever convenience package we end up with)
So I would like to kindly ask our OP to help out (I think you did not want to install python, in that case I am afraid there will be no solution, so please reconsider, pretty please), so some of the burden will be on your shoulders, but if it works out, I can tell you, you will feel happy and proud and that open source feeling.
And I promise that I will boot up my windows machine and try the same code snippets out myself, so we can share our findings, our frustrations, but we will turn them into something positive.
Please , let's work together, we are all right, but NOW LET'S IMPROVE THE USER EXPERIENCE.
Sorry for shouting ;-)
PS : let's not start a code completion discussion here, let's focus on getting e better debugging experience by bundling all the good things we have.[/list]