I have several software developers coming from a Windows C++ background. I have been trying to sort out a good IDE for them. Eclipse CDT C++ plugin is OK. It is useful, better than nothing for someone not happy using Emacs or VI. I used it for ~1 month for ‘toy project work’ in order to see how it was for them.

From there – I was somewhat dissatisfied so I kept looking. Netbeans had some C++ support so I gave it a go. All in all – I preferred Netbeans to Eclipse out of the box. Then – I found my killer feature. Remote development and remote GDB debugging…

Remote Development

You can run a Netbeans IDE on a Windows machine, or a Mac and point it to a Linux (or Solaris) machine. It will SSH/ SCP files back and forth to the box behind the scenes. It will also give you a completely Visual-Studio-like visual step-through debugging interface into GDB. Impressive. After considering running an X Server and getting Eclipse running via VNC – it seems a no brainer.

Anyhow – I am curious to see how it scales to large codebases. I am very optimistic that Netbeans provides a real, viable solution for some devs that have been developing C++ on Windows; to work on Linux…

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