Plug: Started a blog to discuss my C++ journey ...

It's just an informal blog to discuss various aspects of the C++ language, from the personal perspective. For my own record, as well as for reference of other programmers new to C++. Here.

News! Netbeans has support for external editors!

External Editor Module Home Page
Ok, you probably knew it. But I feel like a fool not to have even searched for the existence of something of this kind! Moreover, Netbeans seems to have support for C/C++ too. See this. As of this day, this C/C++ site hasn't been updated since 2002. Hmmm.

No more Eclipse. For now.

Vim won me over. Again!
Eclipse just doesn't cut ice with my workstation. Hell freezes over. And Eclipse decides to crash for lack of memory! (512 MB is all I can afford)
For the vim worshippers, some poissbly useful tips - try vim7 (from CVS), with
- ctags
- icomplete
- The "Buffer Explorer Vim Plugin" (see the plugins section on vim.org)
- The "cppcomplete plugin" (see vim.org)

More on Eclipse (Negative!)

Apparently, if you are looking for an IDE for Java development, NetBeans might be a much better idea if a lot of blogs are to be believed! Well, I too would tend to agree, after having run NetBeans on my PC.

• NetBeans is fast!
• It is from Sun, the creator of Java. Since both NetBeans and Eclipse are written in Java, I believe that Sun can (and did) do better.
  
• It uses Swing which, as per claims in some blogs, is better than SWT which Eclipse uses. (I am no Java, or GUI expert!)
• Eclipse is a all-purpose IDE, and I suppose because of their designs, Eclipse is bound to suffer in terms of performance. Having too many plug-ins (rather, almost everything as a plug-in!) might be an "artistic" thing in terms of design, but takes its toll!

Oh, but I can't use NetBeans for the simple reason that I do not code in Java. And Eclipse, as far as design goes, seems to be a much powerful IDE in terms of extensibility (which means support for almost all kinds of languages.)

Some references:

• Why Eclipse developers are moving to NetBeans?
• Rich Unger's take.
• Benjamin Booth's take.
  

Native Eclipse on Fedora Core 4 : First impressions

Eclipse is an IDE for "anything and nothing in particular." Well, apart from what these Eclipse guys say, I have the following (nice) comments for the one I am using on Fedora Core 4 (native version):

• Given that I have never used and IDE before for any serious development work (but only for killing my curiosity) - I am greatly impressed!
• I am getting started on it for C/C++ development, and the way it actually understands the language makes it a great app!
• You can quickly re-factor code. It handles all changes correctly.
  
• It prompts for the correct completion-options as well as function arguments based on the context - i.e. - it can understand which function, which class, what arguments are the correct ones.
• It integrates very nicely with CVS.
• It even has options of showing differences in the version being edited with the one either on disk or in the repository live.
• I can re-use previously used check-in comments.
• It shows a bird's eye view of all warnings/errors in multiple panels (class/function wise, file-wise) and one can quickly jump to the correct location.

Now, for the not so nice comments:

• Eclipse depends on some JVM to run - and the native JVM (aka gcc-java) is not perfect!
• Starting a project from a CVS-contained codebase doesn't work (well, it did not under the conditions I tried!)
• Some options work differently when run under the native JVM and Sun's JVM! So, be warned that if something looks bad, it might just be the JVM! (Minor stuff, but surprising nevertheless - for example, the "automatically discovered" include paths do not show up in the native JVM based run)
• It's a memory hog! It gave up many a times when I had three projects opened with "out of memory" errors (I set the JVM arguments to use upto 256M of the memory for heap by editing /etc/eclipse.conf - now, I have set this upper limit to 384M)
• One nice thing here is that it warns properly, and moreover shuts down properly without any apparent loss of anything.
• The indexer is not all that intelligent when it comes to being efficient
• For one, the indexing process is another slow one (On second thoughts, given that it does a LOT of work in terms of understanding the codebase, I am being a bit too harsh!)
  
• And then, it re-indexes the file even when there have been no significant indexing-worthy changes (I initially thought the whole project was re-indexed, but it seems only file-local changes are indexed ... the speed gave me the impression that it was the whole project! But even changes in spaces or comments causes the indexer to run ;-))

I would suggest that Eclipse should be run with Sun's JVM and not the GCC-Java implementation to get the correct behaviour.

I can live with the negatives - the positives are compelling. The negatives can be easily handled by switching to a Gig-range memory machine, with dual-core or multiple processors ;-)

More on the Community GEO IP Project

It's not a good idea to follow up one's own posting because the previous one was incomplete. But, excuse me.
I forgot to add that this project offers its source code under open source licensing terms!

Cool app. And a cool tool!

The Community GEO IP Project is a cool web-based app. Given an IP address, it maps it to a country/region - a highly useful thing for targeted applications! And an add-on tool for mozilla/firefox/descendents makes it immediately usable for individuals as well!
Keep in mind, though, that for a lot of unknown mappings, it depends on user feedback/input to update its database. So, you could, if you wish, help them correct their database if you find any problem. Of course, that is entirely voluntary, and if you are not scared by privacy issues etc.
A snapshot of the moz-plugin is included.