Monday, December 27, 2010

New Development Environment

I decided to try out a new IDE I recently learned about – NetBeans, which has integration with CVS, an integrated debugger (front end to GDB), and there is an available plugin to get vim editor capability. Getting the Windows version to work properly was going to be a challenge through.

Currently for development, MSYS (Minimum SYStem) with MinGW (Minimum GNU for Windows) is being used with CVS for MSYS installed for version control.  MinGW was updated to version 4.4.0 of the GNU Compiler Suite. For controlling (building) the project, VIDE2 (a simple IDE) is being used, but it contains a very primitive editor (gVim is being used instead for editing). For debugging, Insight, a GUI front end for GDB (version 6.3) is installed. Insight is not exactly stable (crashes a lot), and the latest version 6.8.1 could not be made to work with MSYS.

I'm not sure I will be able to get NetBeans working satisfactory. So far, after a lot of struggle, NetBeans is working with CVS, though not the CVS that was installed with MSYS. Complete details will be in a future post. The IBCP was successful checked out of the CVS repository with NetBeans, the IBCP project was created NetBeans and was built successfully. Next will be to get the debugger working.

Translator – Sub-String Pre-Release

Now the first eight Translator tests succeed. There are more problems to correct with tests 9 through 12 (test 10 crashes). But, since it has been half a year since code has been released, it's time to commit and tag the changes to CVS and make another pre-release.

I was distracted during the last two months with a work project and didn't get much time to work on this project. I made the mistake of not committing the last good working code to CVS (mainly because I wanted to fix just one more bug).  It took almost a week to recover, figure out what I was in the middle of, make the code compile again, and get the most recent changes working (almost). With that accomplished, a pre-release can be made. The file ibcp_0.1.14-pre-2-src.zip has been uploaded at Sourceforge IBCP Project along with the binary for the program. Now on to more debugging to get the rest of the tests working again...