Delurk and introduction

Hi, I just added this community.

I've been programming in C since early 1990 and in C++ since early 1993. Like twinbee, I've been using C/C++ mainly for OpenGL development.¹ I am a faculty member in Computing and Information Sciences (CIS) at Kansas State University and teach courses in computer graphics and intelligent systems.

Most of our packages such as Bayesian Network tools in Java (BNJ) (documented in bayesnets and developed by robbyjo) and RoboSim (developed by scottharmon and several other students) are written in Java. We also have a community, geckies, and a Wiki RSS feed, geckies_blog, maintained by hermes_imagod, scottharmon, and chriszhong.

Some questions I had:

• I'm curious what IDEs you all prefer.
  I have used Microsoft DevStudio for Visual C++ (v4-6), Metrowerks CodeWarrior (v4-8) for Windows, MacOS, and Linux, Borland C++Builder and JBuilder (v4-8), and most recently Eclipse. I find Eclipse's features to be fantastic and recommend it to anyone. I've looked at a few others (Sun Forté, Symantec Visual Café, IBM VisualAge, BlueJ), but for me, JBuilder took the cake then and Eclipse does now. And lest I'm pegged as one of those whippersnappers with their highfalutin', fancy, newfangled IDEs, I'm one of those vi nuts who will gladly defend the virtues of vi (and GNU emacs; I'm nondenominational) if no superior IDE presents itself. Our standards are exacting! It is vi, after all. :-)


• Similarly, what kind of object/class/use case/sequence diagramming tools do you use?
  I'm still not sanguine about Rational Rose or ArgoUML. My students recommend Poseidon and other tools (including Eclipse plug-ins that scottharmon just reminded me about), but I haven't looked into them much.


• How do you feel about documentation and literate programming tools?
  When I was a functional programming maven, I looked at SMLWeb and Literate Haskell. Since going almost exclusively C++/Java (by necessity), I have focused on tools such as DOxygen, and of course, JavaDoc. I'm interested in your experiences with both free and commercial tools for generating browsable documentation from inline comments and so forth.


• What is your favorite symbolic debugger or memory leak checker?
  sdb? gdb? Something else? I played with Rational Purify during my Standard Template Library-hacking days (c. 1995-1997) under g++, and at the time I gave up and went over to InfoSTL under Visual C++, because g++'s STL implementation was still quite unstable. I really tried to tough it out, too - for about 18-20 months.


• What is your favorite profiling tool?
  gprof? Something else? I have tried to use Metamata for Java, but I didn't get very far with it. I'd especially like to hear recommendations on how to get students to do code tuning. I can't seem to find many who have even heard of profilers outside of our advanced OS course.

It's nice to meet you all!
Oh, just FYI, here is my developer filter (developers, java_dev, cpp, opengl, lj_dev, free_users, roguelikes).

¹ Incidentally, opengl seems a bit inactive. If anyone is using OpenGL or Java3D, please add this community! I'll be posting some links to tutorials and projects such as terrain generation, 3-D visualization, first-person shooters, etc. from my CGA/CGI course.

-William Hsu