Re: [Vala] R: The perfect Vala/GNOME IDE...

[Brian Duffy <brduffy gmail com>]

That's a nice synopsis of what is needed. The question is why is it not
happening? Let's just assume for a minute that Vala is the right language
to attract more mainstream development to linux, and I don't want to debate
that (please, no!), then make the next logical assumption that more people
would try it out if this ideal IDE actually existed. Given the fact that
making it happen is non trivial, you would need to get a team of people
together to work it out, collaborating with the language author. The
compiler would probably need to change if you really want debugging on
something at the level of Visual Studio.

Unfortunately, programmers of these kind of tools don't grow on trees or
have the luxury of devoting the necessary time to a project of this nature
without being payed to do it. So you need a benevolent sponsor who benefits
from an open source IDE for general linux development or you need a company
to develop it for profit. Well, who has the resources and the most to gain
from developing such an environment as open source? The first thought is
Red Hat or Ubuntu, but what do they accomplish if they fund the project? Do
they gain more users of their platform? Not if the tool works on other
distros as well (although you could argue that better dev tools bring more
users to linux in general). Do they make the product free but only usable
on their own distro? Not in their makeup. What about a company making a
proprietary version for profit? Is there enough interest or demand for such
a tool when most developers are targeting far more popular OS's that have
all the proper motivations for maintaining great development tools?

Personally, I am amazed at how useful and robust the development tools on
linux are given that environment. So, I'm willing to do without some
niceties in order to write in Vala instead of C.

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:45 AM, sejerpz tin it <sejerpz tin it> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I see good intentions here, just a note about the "obnoxious
> ValaToys" (why obnoxious?!? ;) )
>
> > The best I've seen of that is the
> obnoxious ValaToys completion which did
> > not parse documentation
> comments and acquired symbols
> > only from opened files.
>
> This is not
> true, vala toys has support for the concept of a "project" with 3
> backends (the most tested is the autotools one) and
> the completion
> engine acquires symbols from all the project's files and not only the
> opened ones, also it finds all the vapi from the
> project packages.
>
> To
> see all the functions that VTG offers you should use "open project"
> from the file menu',
> or enable the *experimental* option
> "Automatically Find Project Root Folder" in the plugin option, and open
> a vala file.
>
> When you have a "project" opened you can jump to any file
> or symbol etc...
>
> The real problem is that afrodite, the completion
> engine library, is very very buggy slow and leaky.
> I've several idea to
> fix it, but no time to do any real development (I'll accept patches of
> course)
>
> Having said that, in my opinion the best feature I'd like to
> see is an integrated debugger.
>
> Have a nice day,
> Andrea
>
> P.S.
> I'm the
> vala-toys developer
>
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-- 
Duff