Discuss tools

[milleniumbug]

This issue is to discuss tools - formatters, build systems and others.

I nominate clang-format

[nabijaczleweli]

👍 for clang-format

[nabijaczleweli]

I also suggest ninja (build system) and CMake

[ghost]

The build system thing is hairy. CMake sucks a lot imo. make/autoconf, scons, waf, gyp, msbuild/devenv, nmake, qmake, they all suck. Ninja is cool, but it's incomplete - you need a generator. I 👍 ninja only right now.

[ghost]

I tried astyle, it looked decent, but I heard clang-format is better. Someone to second millenium here?

[ghost]

lol I just missed your nab. Okay, add it guys.

[nabijaczleweli]

ninja isn't incomplete in that regard - it's specifically designed to be generated, rather than written by hand, as indicated on the project page:

it is designed to have its input files generated by a higher-level build system

[ghost]

It's specifically designed to be incomplete. You want a build system, you pick ninja, you have to walk the extra mile to actually have something working. I know it's not very hard to do it yourself, but you still have to do it.

[nabijaczleweli]

Any idea on what description to add for clang-format? There doesn't seem to be an "official" one.

[Morwenn]

The static analyzer Cppcheck is really simple to use and helped me to catch subtle things from time to time; I think it's worth mentioning. Also, valgrind catches some bugs too from time to time.

[milleniumbug]

+1 for valgrind

[Morwenn]

I have heard that the sanitizers available in Clang and GCC are great too (undefined behaviour, address and thread sanitizers). Some of them do what valgrind does but with a lower overhead. Too bad they do not work with MinGW. I wish I could test them.

[nabijaczleweli]

But those are compiler built-ins (-fsanitize=address), so they don't qualify as "tools" per se.

[Morwenn]

It's more like they are branded as additional tools that just happen to be directly incorporated in the compiler. And it seems that not enough people know about them.

[nabijaczleweli]

I also propose @rightfold

[no-longer-on-githu-b]

"Compilers" should be a level-2 heading under "Tools"

[no-longer-on-githu-b]

Also add the clang modernization tools, LLDB, GDB, and SWIG.

[ghost]

SWIG sucks in many ways. It's not awesome at all

[no-longer-on-githu-b]

ok

[Morwenn]

Agreed that compilers could appear in tools.

[nabijaczleweli]

kk, moving

[milleniumbug]

I nominate MSYS2, as it's awesome, it has a package manager, and mostly fresh packages.

[nabijaczleweli]

👍 MSYS2

[Morwenn]

Concerning MSYS2, shall we mention Git Bash, which uses MSYS2 if I'm not mistaken and has this nice feature that allows to see the branch we're currently working on?

[nabijaczleweli]

So much fuss about adding git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD to $PS1

[Morwenn]

Good thing to know (yeah, I don't know my tools) :D

[nabijaczleweli]

Google is your firand

[milleniumbug]

Haven't used Git Bash, but I'd say meh, it doesn't seem that it adds anything substantial, and the other problem is the introduction: MSYS2 provides an ecosystem, which Git is one of the possible ingredients, Git Bash screams "hey, I'm the shell which you can give commands to Git", which is less impressive.