Re: [cdt-dev] Visual C++ Build Integration

[Doug Schaefer <cdtdoug@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 5:21 PM, Dmitry Nezhevenko <dion@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 10:42:01PM -0400, Doug Schaefer wrote:
>> Hey gang,
>>
>> I'm having a spurt of productivity tonight and have entered another
>> enhancement for a plan item for CDT 8.0. This one is to complete the
>> build integration plug-in that I started long ago for Visual C++. The
>> driver for this is that, thanks to the work Eugene has done on the
>> reference TCF agent, we have a good start at a Windows debug
>> integration. I'll be working on bringing that to completion too and
>> give us a pretty good Visual C++ story.
>>
>> The bug is here: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=321445
>>
>> BTW, the focus for this integration is the Windows SDK version 7.0 and
>> anything they release later. We could add Visual Studio, assuming it's
>> different, in the future.
>
> What I want to ask is about how it will work (in future)? Will it be able
> to parse/read/build visual studio solution files? Or it's just about
> toolchain.

My personal focus is on the Windows SDK and using CMake which
generates Makefiles for nmake. There is some managed build support
which uses CDT's internal builder as well.

Marc-Andre has mentioned on the bug his interest in supporting MSBuild
which uses the VS project files. Although, unless you also update
those project files when you add new files, or when you want to make
settings changes, I'm not sure it's a complete solution. But whatever
you VS guys want to do.

> A lot of c++ devs are forced to use visual studio on win due to it's
> project files. It will be very cool feature to have some minimal (read
> only) support of MSVC solutions. Like build/clean project/solution/current
> source file. So MSVC here is just a "custom" build system.
>
> And same applies sometimes also for apple's Xcode projects. They sucks
> much more than MSVC...

Well, the only hope I found was using CMake to generate Xcode project
files and using their xcodebuild. But without Objective-C support in
CDT, that's not a complete solution either.

> Maybe it's better to introduce some kind of "universal" non-managed build
> system that will have configurable commands for
> building/autobuilding/cleaning/etc? And maybe even hooks for "file/class
> added/removed".  Something not dependent on particular build system at
> all. This allows easy integration with very custom systems in case if user
> is able to write a few "helper" scripts.

Well, that's in the other bug I created for the build model.

> Btw, are there any plans to support "compile/preprocess single file"?

There has been the odd talk about that. The problem when dealing with
makefiles, of course, is knowing how to trigger the rule that causes
the single file compile. The mapping from source to object file is
often not obvious. Managed build should be able to do it since it
manages that information. Not sure it's been done, though.