What’s Next for CLion: 2024.2 Roadmap

Andrey Gushchin

The first release of 2024 brought many enhancements for CLion, including new features in the writing assistance for CMake files and integration with CMake presets, improvements to the support for Meson and Bazel, debugger fixes and enhancements, assembly view updates, and much more. Check out all the improvements on our website and give version 2024.1 a try.

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To ensure you have a smooth and productive development experience, our team has been working on further enhancements to bring you even more!

The following is a preliminary plan and not a promise or commitment. Tasks might be changed or rescheduled for various reasons. We can’t guarantee that all the issues listed below will be addressed in CLion 2024.2.

The team has identified the following key objectives for the 2024.2 update: 

• 🚀 Deeper integration of CLion Nova with CLion Classic
• 🪲 Performance improvements for the debugger
• 🤖 New features for embedded development
• 🏘️ Enhancements for project models and build tools

CLion Nova

When it comes to CLion Nova, the new language engine from ReSharper C++ and Rider C++, our main focus for the CLion 2024.2 release is to continue working on its stability and on implementing the most requested features, such as the following:

• Support for remote development via Gateway (CPP-36010) and Code With Me functionality (CPP-36095).
• Multi-line cloud-based code completion (CPP-37180), which leverages the power of JetBrains AI Assistant to generate and suggest whole snippets of C++ code.
• For those who can’t use cloud LLMs, we will implement support for local full line completion (CPP-37343), which suggests new code using local models without sending any of your data over the web.

Debugger

We continue to work on performance improvements for the debugger. In the 2024.1 release, we introduced an experimental setting that allows CLion to prepare indexes before the debug session starts. This works on Linux machines for executables launched from the IDE and, in some cases, improves the startup time of debug sessions after the first one.

As a next step, we plan to investigate and eliminate cases of slow node expansion in the variables view.

Embedded development

As the Zephyr Project is attracting increasing attention from embedded developers, we are interested in implementing a more profound integration with Zephyr and CLion. A Zephyr project can be configured and opened in CLion using Zephyr’s CMake configuration. However, Zephyr’s West meta-tool is recommended for working with Zephyr projects.

Opening, correctly configuring, and building a Zephyr project using West in CLion requires many manual actions, like setting up West as an external tool in CLion and creating a custom build target for each of your Zephyr applications.

We want to address this issue by introducing a new kind of project model supported by CLion – the so-called West project (CPP-16584) – that, at first, will allow users to open and build an existing Zephyr project using the West tool without additional configuration.

Let us know what next steps you’d like to see for the integration with Zephyr and CLion in the following releases!

Project models and build tools

CLion supports various build systems, including CMake, compilation databases, Makefiles, Gradle, Bazel (via external plugins), and the recently introduced Meson.

Sometimes, it can be hard to tell at a glance if a project is configured incorrectly or to identify why code insight features may not work as expected. Usually, the latter is a consequence of the former because CLion relies heavily on the information the build system provides, like included files, compiler flags, and linker options. That information allows CLion to correctly highlight, inspect, and refactor your code. 

We’re working to introduce an explicit indicator that will show the current project status for specific build systems and help you fix incorrectly configured projects and use the full potential of CLion’s smart features.

Also, as usual, we are keeping up with recent updates to the build tools, so we will bundle the new CMake 3.29 in this release.

Call for feedback

Your feedback is important to us, as your experience and insights are essential to the continuous improvement of CLion. Please share your ideas in the comments section below or submit them to our issue tracker. We’re also interested in scheduling short calls with our users to learn about specific cases in more detail. Let us know if you’re willing to participate!
The free Early Access Program is around the corner! In the meantime, upgrade to CLion v2024.1 if you haven’t done so already, and let us know what you think!

Your CLion team
JetBrains
The Drive to Develop

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