"Ben Combee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > 2) What is Palm doing to make development faster
> > and easier? Some might say this isn't Palm's
> > problem, but I say it is. CodeWarrior and
> > Constructor -- in my humble opinion -- suck. I like
> > GCC, but a lot of people are intimidated by it. What
> > is to be done?
>
>As technical lead for the CodeWarrior for Palm OS team since May, I
>can't reveal exactly what we have in store, but I would like
>to say that we are working very hard to improve the toolset, and I feel
>the next version will be a major improvement for all of our Palm customers.
>We're committed to listening to the Palm community and implementing
>features to improve the scope of development you can do and to make
>building Palm software easier and quicker.
>
>That's all I'm saying for now. If you think CodeWarrior sucks, let us
>know and give us feedback. I think the core CW toolset for Palm is very
>solid: the compiler, the linker, and the debugger. The IDE has grown
>out of a very Macintosh-centric group, and they've missed some needed
>functionality in the pursuit of major features like code browsing,
>remote debugging, a comprehensive compiler/linker/pref panel plugin
>architecture, cross-platform compatibility, file and directory
>difference engines, version control interfaces, COM and AppleScript
>scripting, and RAD for Java and embedded frameworks. I'm working with
>them to try to get features that Palm developers need implemented for
>future versions.
Well, since you asked...:-), here is why I think CodeWarrior sucks
(actually, it doesn't really _suck_, but it could use improvements).
I don't know if these are all CodeWarrior issues really, maybe Palm
would need to change stuff as well:
o Real ANSI support. In particular, if I am using bison, I should be
able to include the generated code without change. Maybe I should have
to include it in a file with additional headers, and change some of the
compile flags, but I should not have to touch the code. If I have to
change the code (at all), then it means I have to change the code every
time I run bison. That's bad.
o Improved shared library support. In this day and age, I should not
have to write a jump table in assembly to make a shared library. It is
a travesty. IMHO one of the things that makes Palm programming difficult
is that you have to reinvent the wheel each time you write something
because you can't box up and carry around your wheels. Windows and SunOS
have real libraries, why not Palm?
o GNU make (or ant) style makefile support, or some other way to do
compilation control reasonably. I recently had to change the paths for
one of my projects to include code written by others. But, I
had multiple places in the other code in my access paths. And, I had
multiple targets. Ugh. I had to step through the damn browser over
and over and over again. I could have done it in under 30 keystrokes
using emacs and a makefile. IDE's are nice and all, but sometimes
(often? usually?) a decent or better programmer can use a text based
file and editor much much faster than going through menus. Yes, I tried
export, modify, and import and it totally hosed up.
o Error reporting, esp. for headers. Ever have an error in some obscure
header that you didn't include? Did you wonder how the heck it got into
your file? When you do that with GNU tools, it says the error was in
line X1 of file Y1, included by line X2 of file Y2, included by line X3
of file Y3, etc. all the way to the file that is actually under your
control. CodeWarrior doesn't say and it's maddening.
That's it for now. I'm sure other things will pop into my mind later,
and I'll be sure to forward them to the list.
Clark
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