At 10:11 AM 11/25/2005, you wrote:
C)On PODS simplicity
Yeah, coding is fun. But:
We don't just program for the fun-we also want to make some cash and get
forward fast(success experience, yeah, it works, gotta get myself some Red
Bull/Full speed now). And having problems with BASIC stuff like variables
and autocompletition really is not state of the art imho. If you open the
autopcompletition on my 1800MhZ P4, you have to like wait a minute
sometimes-as if typing wasn't faster...
PODS is built on top of Eclipse and the C Development Tools project --
PalmSource really just did packaging and debugging support. CDT is gaining
momentum, but the version used for all of the PODS releases so far has
significant problems.
BTW, both Java and Visual Basic are much, much easier to parse and build
completion information for than C/C++. With these languages, you've got
header files, macros, typedefs, and templates to deal with, all of which
add significant complication to any on-the-fly parsing. CW's original
support for this (mainly symbol lookup) was pretty good because it used
information generated by the compiler as a by-product of the build
process. The completion support in CW9 worked sometimes, but it got
tripped up a lot by complicated language structures or by incomplete code.
In Eclipse CDT, they made some initial design decisions for how they were
going to handle completion and code management that proved to lead to a
slow, fragile system. I know they've done significant work on this for CDT
3.0, but I've got no idea when or if PalmSource will update PODS to use the
newer CDT and Eclipse IDEs.
The best way to help the state of PODS C language support is to get
involved with the Eclipse CDT project. Unfortunately, it's a Java project
supporting C and C++ developers, so the number of people deeply involved in
both worlds is limited. On the plus side, Eclipse CDT is being backed by
some big players now, including IBM and Nokia, so there's a good chance
that it will improve quite a bit in the near future.
-- Ben Combee, Senior Software Engineer, Palm, Inc.
"Combee on Palm OS" weblog: http://palmos.combee.net/
Developer Forum Archives: http://news.palmos.com/read/all_forums/
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