[ardour-dev] File Extensions and Preprocessor stuff

[John Emmas]

>>
>> So, no need for an IDE to develop a windows port of ardour anymore ;-)
>
> Actually, MS has released (and will include in Vista) a quite
> sophisticated command-line environment:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
>
> The examples look intriguing:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell#Examples
>
IMHO the command line has only two advantages over a development IDE; the
first one being that there's only one command line so everyone who uses it
has to use it the same way.  In other words, the command line approach is
good for enforcing consistency.  This is in contrast to IDE's where, as Paul
pointed out, there are many different IDE's all with their own different
approaches.

The second advantage is to do with upgrades.  Personally, I don't accept the
argument that you can do things with a command line that couldn't be done
with an IDE, although that's bound to be true if someone was using an
out-of-date IDE.  So the second advantage is that you can upgrade your
compiler / linker or whatever without needing to update a command line.
This is seldom possible for an IDE.

However apart from those 2 disadvantages, my experience is that IDE's
offer a superior build environment in pretty much all other respects -
and.I'm not referring to the eye candy appeal.  Generally speaking it tends
to be much easier to visualize the structure of a project from within an
IDE.  And another area where IDE's score highly is in their debugging
capabilities, which tend to be vastly more intuitive.  Maybe I just write
more buggy code than everyone else - but I do tend to spend a LOT of
my time debugging..!

Just my 2 cents....

John