Anti-rec for Dev-C++

[kaberett]

... a dev environment for C/C++ under Windows.

On start-up, you get greeted with the following:

Tip of the day

Did you know...

... you shouldn't disable these tips? The tips presented here will give you undocumented information not found anywhere else. If you disable them and want to view them at a later time, select "Help / Tip of the day"...

I then scrolled through some of the tips of the day... and the ones I saw were largely about enabling or disabling features.

I am SO unimpressed. I am probably not unimpressed enough to scrounge up something else, given that I don't want to do much with C++ this week, but WOW.

Comments

[frith_in_thorns]

WHY are those tips "not documented anywhere else"?!

[kaberett]

RIGHT.

[mfb]

Are you looking for counter-recs, or have you found something else to use already?

[kaberett]

I'm probably gonna Just Use This, because it's Here Now and I amn't gonna need it for very long; if I end up doing any serious C++ (as opposed to using existing libraries) I will Find Something Better.

[mfb]

That works. I would've suggested Visual Studio (yes, it can do C++ that isn't VC++!) but that shit takes a week to install.

This is definitely a situation that can be described as What The Documentation, though.

[catyak]

I use Qt. mainly because it just works under Windows[*] and Linux (albeit with extra faff if I'm playing with hardware drivers because some are Just Different). I get on with QtCreator as a user-friendly IDE and it creates proper makefiles I can use outside of the GUI if I need to do a quick change later and don't want to fire up the whole thing. It helps that it has classes and features that match a lot of the C# stuff, which has allowed me to port a few C# apps to Linux (and they work much more smoothly using Qt on a Linux netbook than using C# on a good-spec Windows desktop).

[*] although thinking about it, perhaps it expects Visual C++ or other compiler to already be resident.

D

[cjwatson]

I have never encountered "tips of the day" in development environments (or indeed most other programs) that are at all useful in any way. About the best you can hope for is that they might teach you a small handful of non-obvious things about the environment itself.

For the actual language, steer well clear; the documentation is liable to be full of things that are specific to that environment and is unlikely to flag non-portable language features terribly clearly, because if they did that then it would be much easier to switch to a different environment. Much better to learn portable code if possible.