Call Graphs, Eclipse and Techbase

Sunday, 21 June 2009 | tstaerk

Some weeks ago, someone posted a question on the KDE PIM mailing list "Which IDE do you use" or so. This reminded me of the ideals of my youth when I believed that the better your IDE - the more efficient your programming work - the more you get done in a given time for your software development.

Well, since some years I have not been using any IDE any more. First because I was too lazy to integrate KDE 4 into kdevelop. Then Thomas wrote this cool howto and I got my ktimetracker to kompile from within kdevelop quickly. Then I was frustrated by several glitches of kdevelop. In my eyes, there is no tremendous difference to kwrite. However, I gave up again.

OK, on this mail to the KDE PIM mailing list, I saw eclipse mentioned. I thought it would be a good idea to pass a weekend evaluating it and writing a techbase article on it. And I can only say - I am overwhelmed. Apart from some minor glitches (to import a project, do not choose "File -> Import", but "File -> Open") I just get what I wanted:

Code completion works
Running applications with one click works
You can carry on svn'ing
Classes are detected dependably
Quickly switch between implementation and declaration (meaning you can get to the apidox-explanation of a function quickly)

And, the killer feature for me: Call graphs work. Yes, those little graphs telling you what function calls which! That do not even work well in the stand-alone program doxygen!

If you now want to know how you can use eclipse for your KDE development, here is my tutorial.