On 20 September 2013 23:22, Wyatt <wyatt.epp@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, 20 September 2013 at 07:16:09 UTC, Manu wrote:
[...]

It needs a reasonable amount of support from the compiler and presumably cooperation from the debugger too. If people have
never heard of it, chances are, it doesn't exist :(

Google has been hitting close to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U98rhV6wONo (slides:
http://llvm.org/devmtg/2012-04-12/Slides/Manuel_Klimek.pdf)
Lot of potential here, even for a die-hard Vim user like myself.

... I didn't see him mention it at all. However he did mention lots of useful things.
It looks like finally there are some people interested in closing the gap between VS.
Clang is a super exciting piece of C/C++ technology. Why is it that they are so innovative when GCC is basically stagnant for ages?

Mmmm, a concept that I've always found completely amazing actually. How is it that Linux - truly an OS for developers
(certainly not for end-users) - can consistently be plagued by
the worst dev tools out there? Surely someone in the past 30-40
years get's frustrated at some stage, looks at what MS have
been doing for over a decade, and think "shit, that's awesome,
I'd like that too!". I'm actually amazed that MS managed to
invent it in the first place. You'd think that Linux should have
gotten to it first...

Part of this would seem to be the simple fact that the GNU
toolchain is the de facto standard for working in Linux and other
Unixen.  If you've ever encountered a GNU project's general
attitude toward patches and ideas from "outsiders", the concerns
presented in this SO answer might offer some clarity as to why
it's taken so long:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/4440794/432364

Sadly, I don't think that guy who responded actually knew much about it. He was making it sound harder than it is, and most of the questions/problems he raised are known and/or solved already by MS.
The point is, there's a perfectly good working example, and it's well understood how it works. (but apparently he didn't read up on it at all)

In short: getting all the people involved to agree on answers to
all these questions is sort of a hard problem.
(Though it looks like "Fix-and-continue" was added to the GDB
roadmap about a year ago:
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/cauldron2012?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=jkratoch.pdf)

Huzzah! Better late than never I guess...
I'm actually wondering if the recent movement of ex-windows dev's towards things like android/iphone/web/etc, is fueling a whole bunch of new voices behind the rubbish *nix tooling.
A massive industry of users who have for the longest time been perfectly happy with VS, are now having to find new tools for prevailing non-MS platforms, and becoming frustrated in the process. (I can refer to rant's and complaints from countless (ex-)colleagues, perhaps numbering well into the hundreds)

I agree, I'm really looking forward to what they bring to the table. I expect it's a lot of work though... they have over a
decade of catching up to do.

Per the links above, they might be closer than it initially
appears.  Of course, it's also a matter of integration and
coordination across multiple projects.  There are, occasionally,
advantages to monolithic vertically-integrated dictatorships.

LLVM would seem to have the best shot at it. Given the current trajectory, I'm optimistic I can abandon VS in maybe 2-3 years...
Don't get me wrong, there's loads of things wrong with VS. I'm not married to it, it's actually crap in lots of ways, but it just has so many productivity features that I consider absolutely non-negotiable.
I prefer Clang/GCC the compilers right now. But VS is so much more than a compiler.