Re: [Vala] State of Vala IDEs

[Thomas Jollans <t jollybox de>]

On 06/25/2012 11:02 PM, Thomas Jollans wrote:
> I like the look of MonoDevelop in general from the few times that I've
> had a look at it, if you ignore the fact that it has never really been
> stable. What's the state of its Vala support? Does it work? Does code
> completion work? Critically, does debugging work?
>
> Anjuta, that old horse -- it's never been particularly good to me, but
> as "the GNOME IDE", it may be worth a look -- how's its Vala support?
> Debugger? Code completion?

It's been a while since this thread was active. Here are some short
notes on my experience - note that I haven't spent a lot of time in
these IDEs as I've been mostly sticking to vim and doing other stuff.


Anjuta - would appear to make most sense for an autotools-based project,
but the code completion is useless: It doesn't complete symbols in the
current class (or even in the entire local project? I'm not sure). Even
the dumb completion in vim is better than this. When I tried completing
something in a library, it did promisingly pop up a list, and then it
crashed. It tried, at least. Could be worse.

MonoDevelop - so far, it's great! It took a little more effort to get it
to open my autotools-based project, but I got the debugger working
without too much fuss (I had to tell it where the executable would be
and what arguments it would take; Makefile integration does the rest)
Code completion works well. You can tell that this was built for (and
using) the .NET technologies, and Vala is more similar to C# than to C.
There are some glitches. For example, the class browser displays each
namespace multiple times, probably once for each source file that
declares it, but each namespace in the list actually contains all the
relevant classes in the entire project, not just in one source file.


I'm happy to see that Vala debugging works these days and that both
large Gnome IDEs integrade gdb in a way that works for Vala projects.