Pros and Cons of the Sun studio IDE

Question

Hi all,
I have played a bit with the Sun studio now and I want to give you some feedback.
First of all, my background. I am working in a team with about 20 developers, developing a C++ application on Solaris.
Last time I stumbled across an installed Sun Studio 9 and gave it a try.
Initially I was verry impressed by the great debugger- and analyzer frontends, they look nice and work well.
After using the debugger from time to time and really enjoyed it, I thought about testing the studio for all-day work.
So, here are my impressions and the things that keep me away from using it.
1. The default editor isn't very usefull. For example, I missed regular expression search (and replace) and the feature to mark columns. Furthermore I really missed syntax highlightning for some other file types like sql- and config files, or even the feature to create my own. By the way, the predefined highlightning for C-files is also a bit too simple.
2. I think the external editor plugin is a bit buggy too, because sometimes I have trash in files that I have edited before. But this can also be my fault, because I use gvim and some editor macros to do sccs-actions. I think the problems occur mainly if I use this macros. In every case the external editor is not really an alternative way for me.
2. In our team we are using teamware as version-control tool and it does a really good job. So for Workshop 7 we have some editor macros and the teamware-tools from version 6. In the studio I have found the feature to create my own version control profiles, but this is a hard way with many tries and errors. For example I have never accomplished it to set further status information in the explorer window, it's 'Local' all the time.
3. The studio needs very much memory, I think about 250 MB or so. This is impressive, especially if all the 20 people in our team would start sunstudio. I have found a hint somewhere in the docu that the studio can work in a client-server mode over a VNC, but I haven't tried it because I don't know what the admins would say if I start running my own VNC.
4. After I have also tried eclipse with the cdt plugin, I really began to like the source-browser and missed it in the studio.
5. All in all I hoped that the newest Sunstudio got a netbeans update, because some of the plugins that exists only for newer netbeans-versions would also be useful for me and my team. But, at least the latest linux-preview is also based on netbeans 3.5. Maybee do you have plans to update netbeans within the studio?
Ok, that's all for now ;-)
Please don't understand me wrong, I really like some features of the studio, and it's a great improvement compared with the workshop version 6 that I used before. But, at all for me the studio is still not useable in all-day work.
P.S.
At work I have only access to Sun studio version 9, at home I have also tried version 11, that is the reason why I mixed the version-numbers sometimes ;-)
With kind regards,
Maaz76

Answer 1

1. The default editor isn't very usefull. For example, I missed
regular expression search (and replace) and the feature to
mark columns. Furthermore I really missed syntax highlightning
for some other file types like sql- and config files, or even the
feature to create my own. By the way, the predefined highlightning
for C-files is also a bit too simple.The current IDE we're working on is based on a current NetBeans
and has regular expression search (and replace). I'm pretty sure
NetBeans 5.0 (and presumably later versions) has syntax highlighting
for sql (its got an "SQL Editor" module which I'm guessing has the
highlighing you're asking for).
We're also working on many new editor features not in current
Sun Studio IDEs. These are mostly parser based stuff like code
completion, code folding, and a class viewer.
2. I think the external editor plugin is a bit buggy too, because
sometimes I have trash in files that I have edited before. But this
can also be my fault, because I use gvim and some editor macros
to do sccs-actions. I think the problems occur mainly if I use this
macros. In every case the external editor is not really an alternative
way for me.Its very difficult keeping sources in synch between netbeans and
an external editor. If you can give us a repeatable scenario for
failure we can take a look.
2. In our team we are using teamware as version-control tool and
it does a really good job. So for Workshop 7 we have some editor
macros and the teamware-tools from version 6. In the studio I have
found the feature to create my own version control profiles, but this
is a hard way with many tries and errors. For example I have never
accomplished it to set further status information in the explorer
window, it's 'Local' all the time.We'll definately have sccs support in the next release. TeamWare
support depends on the status of TeamWare. Sun end-of-lifed it
4 years ago. As long as its EOL'ed, we won't support it. But if it
were officially brought back, we'd (most likely) support it.
3. The studio needs very much memory, I think about 250 MB
or so. This is impressive, especially if all the 20 people in our team
would start sunstudio. I have found a hint somewhere in the docu
that the studio can work in a client-server mode over a VNC, but I
haven't tried it because I don't know what the admins would say if
I start running my own VNC.The VNC model shouldn't help on memory. How do you use the IDE
now? Do each of your 20 developers have Solars desktops? I'm
guessing they don't since you're talking about 20 users on one
system. The VNC approach runs all 20 IDEs (assuming all 20
developers are concurrently running the IDE) on the server machine.
So VNC won't help in that case.
On the other hand, if the 20 developers have Windows PCs on their
desktop then the next IDE should help substantially. We're working
on having the IDE run locally on your desktop, and do remote building
and debugging on your Solaris server. This puts most of the IDE
overhead on your desktop rather than the server. This should be
a much better model for multi-user development where Solaris
developers don't have Solaris desktops.
4. After I have also tried eclipse with the cdt plugin, I really began
to like the source-browser and missed it in the studio.We're planning on some browser capabilities. Some are in the
planning stages and others aren't even that far along. But we are
getting repeated inquiries about a source browser.
5. All in all I hoped that the newest Sunstudio got a netbeans
update, because some of the plugins that exists only for newer
netbeans-versions would also be useful for me and my team. But,
at least the latest linux-preview is also based on netbeans 3.5.
Maybee do you have plans to update netbeans within the studio?Well, each major netbeans release has had so many internal
changes its been difficult keeping up. Our next release is planning
to be much more in synch with NetBeans releases. We're doing
current development on the NetBeans trunk (currently thats targeting
the NetBeans 6.0 release).
Gordon