[mercury-users] Your postings about the prospective IDE.

[Jonathan Morgan]

On 19/10/06, RMJ <radse1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Dear All who wrote giving suggestions for the IDE,
>
> Thank you so much for your suggestions. Here is what I
> found (from programmers/CS students):
>
> - Eclipse is too much trouble.

I've never used it, but it wouldn't surprise me.

> - Creating Qt or Gtk bindings takes too much time.
> Bindings generator is usually not enough. It takes
> some manual editing too. C wrapper for Qt is available
> so it's as good as Gtk.

Working with a C wrapper for a C++ library can be messy and
error-prone.  As far as automatic generation, Gtk# uses complete
automatic generation, but allows user-customisation of what is
generated at various levels (this customisation is placed in separate
files and configuration parameters, in order to avoid the prospect of
merging hand-edited code with newly generated code.  I would intend
largely to follow a similar approach.

> - I tried Tcl/Tk (Java's Swing too) several years ago
> and I don't think it can be used to build a
> good-looking and handy IDE (I got the same answer from
> others too).

I'm inclined to agree.

> So, with the little time that I have my quick search
> ended with two possible ways to go:
>
> 1- FreePascal/Lazarus: Free Delphi-like RAD with which
> a simple and good-looking IDE can be created and
> compiled for several platforms including MS-Windows.

Interesting - I always found C++ Builder (based on Delphi) a
comfortable IDE for GUI development (though vim could beat its builtin
text editor any day).

> 2- Boa constructor: wxPython GUI Builder (also RAD)
> and since it's Python it should run on MS-Windows too.

Just because it's Python doesn't necessarily mean it's portable
(py-win32 certainly isn't).  However, wxPython is pretty portable.

> I'm a little rusty with Pascal but I can see that it
> will take the least possible time to develop. I or
> anybody else who is kind enough to contribute can add
> more and more features in the future. The project is
> under heavy development. The current beta product is
> usable and can do a lot (really a lot). I tried it and
> in a matter of minutes found how handy it is. There
> are many bugs but not in the objects that I intend to
> use.
>
> Boa is under slow development pace. I have no idea how
> good it is. Scripting languages are probably too slow
> for a GUI IDE !?!

I have heard very good reports of Boa.  I'm not convinced that Python
would really be too slow for an IDE, so long as you don't want all the
context-sensitivity of a major IDE like Visual Studio (which is
computationally expensive).

> So, I'll start with FreePascal/Lazarus soon and see
> how it goes.

It will be interesting to see how much an IDE needs to change to
support Mercury, and conversely how much Mercury needs to change to
support an IDE.

Jon
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