[fpc-other] Other IDEs

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Paul Robinson said:

> The IDE such as Delphi provides is fairly good, and unless you're going to
> be developing for text environments it is the way to go.  And the IDE such
> as what was provided by Visual Basic is even better than the one for
> Delphi because it gave a much better environment for doing on-the-fly
> development.  Anyone who dismisses what Visual Basic was as a toy never
> used it in version 6 or in .NET as it can be used for professional
> development.

If you really want to further this, compare all contendents head to head,
and make a deeper analysis of the differences and what they actually
provide. (IOW does the typically use case of a feature really fit at all?)

I never understood the heated debates over VB-the-IDE. The few times I used it
(after Delphi) gave me a feeling of same old, same old. But typically I'm
not a man that tries to solve everything designtime, also in Delphi.
 
> But I think if all we want is a language to teach programming then we're
> not going to get much attention or interest from professional developers. 
> As soon as someone goes through the language and the tools, and finds that
> they can't get certain professional development done, they're going to
> move on to something else.

I'm afraid this is so vague and opinionated that it is next to useless. We
need detailed data and comparisons, not opinions that are cast down from an
ivory tower of "professionalism". 

And that is even stepping over the fact that the common paths might be
exactly what you want to avoid, since the commercial IDEs already cover it.

> My thought is, if we want people to consider FPC as a serious,
> professional-class application, it needs to interface to a serious,
> professional-class IDE and use as much of the provided features as is
> available.  And as I see it, that means that FPC should be able to be used
> with Eclipse.

Which has been said before, but nobody has said why?  
 
> I believe Eclipse provides a lot of nice features including identifier
> lookup and run-time tracing and variable examination.

Some of these are provided by Lazarus too. And worse, afaik it isn't Eclipse
that provides these, but (partially) language dependant plugins. One can't
expect them to cater to FPC automatically (or even at all)

> are things that need to be done if they're not already.  Better debugging
> support so that applications which are not production can get better
> "while running" analysis including real-time monitoring and control of
> execution, variable values and code paths.  I know some of this might not
> be significant for some people but it will be to others.

The debugging problem is mostly a GDB problem, and both Lazarus and Eclipse
use GDB. So there is not much to be expected from Eclipse in that field.

> I could probably say more but I think I'm still on point and so I'll stop
> here rather than go on and bore people, although I might already have done
> so. :)

To be honest, I've seen nothing but the usual rants where something is
compared to something where heaps of fulltime programmers work on, meaning
Eclipse and the default plugins bundled with them.

THAT is the crucial problem with FPC, not Lazarus vs Eclipse. If you are
willing to fund such a team, by all means, do. You can even have a say about
direction.

Seriously, if you really want to contribute to this discussion, go into
detail, describe problems, dissect Eclipse to see what makes it tick, and
what is language dependant. THOSE are things that might give a new
perspective on a changed situation. Not these kinds of gratituous
comparisons.