Backstage Early Access Program

CLion EAP, what’s next?

Hey folks,

In the following days after the public EAP announcement we received tons of feedback, questions and bug reports from you, and let us tell you, it feels great to let CLion out in the wild at last! Despite some issues, the launch went really well and we are eager to hear more from you as we gradually shape the IDE.

While listening to you, we were also busy fixing and investigating critical problems some ran into, these are mostly compatibility and toolchains issues. Also, we are working to make it easier to open existing non-CMake projects in CLion. The current plan is to publish the first update in a week or two.

And here is a short overview of the most requested things in our tracker:
* the unrivaled leaders are support for Makefiles and Qt projects.
* MinGW 64-bit support.
* Cross-compilation/cross-debug.
* Google Test support.
* Improved CMake configuration.

These are really important features, but we would like to clarify how our plans correlate, to avoid confusion.

Until version 1.0 we will continue improving and polishing CMake support, C++ parsing/resolving, performance and overall experience. And, while we understand that you’d want to open your existing projects in CLion, we’ll only think about additional build systems after 1.0. So if you want to try CLion, there is no point in waiting for Makefiles/Qt/you-name-it support for now, but we hope that the next EAP will help opening your existing non-CMake projects easily so you can then give the IDE a try.

As you may have guessed, cross-compilation/cross-debug is also out of scope of version 1.0.

We will add MinGW 64 support shortly, no doubt, and also improve compatibility with various toolchains that are already supported. You can expect more options and flexibility when using CMake projects and improved debugger stability and performance.

Another major area we want to cover in 1.0 is better integration of refactorings and CMake files. Currently, most of the changes in project structure (e.g adding new files, deleting or moving) need to be manually reflected in CMakeLists files. We’ll try to make everything as transparent as possible, so that refactorings such as Move/Extract Class/etc automatically update CMakeLists.

Please keep voting and suggesting new ideas – your feedback is invaluable to us. And, of course, feel free to ask if you have any questions.

–Yours,
The CLion Team

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