What’s next? CLion 2018.1 roadmap

Anastasia Kazakova

Hi,

Two weeks ago we released this year’s third big update – CLion 2017.3! It made C++ code analysis more accurate in many areas and added support for MSVC extensions, integrations with Valgrind Memcheck and Boost.Test, and many other improvements and new features.

Now we’re ready to share with you our primary directions for 2018 in general and the roadmap for v2018.1 in particular.

Special thanks

Before moving on to our plans for 2018, let’s follow our good tradition and thank those who helped make CLion 2017.3 feature-rich and stable! These four contributors to CLion’s Early Access Program deserve a special mention:

• Roman Popov (YouTrack handle: ripopov)
• Chris Uzdavinis (YouTrack handle: cuzdav2)
• Roger Dubbs (YouTrack handle: rogerdubbs)
• Tomasz Grabiec (YouTrack handle: tgrabiec)

In appreciation of your efforts, we present each of you with a free 1-year subscription for CLion (to extend your current subscription or get a new one). You will receive a personal email with details on how to claim your license. (If for some reason you do not get any email from us within a week, ping us here in the comments!)

CLion in 2018

First, I’d like to outline our major directions and priorities for 2018, and then share the roadmap for 2018.1 that is in line with the general plan.

C++ language support and IDE performance

We talked in the past about our plans for big overhauls in several problematic areas of the C++ language engine. We’ve got overload resolution, list initialization, and name lookup there already. The latter still needs some extra work, and then we’ll move forward.

We would also like to focus more on performance, especially on your user experience while typing. We’ll dedicate the next release cycle to fixing IDE freezes.

You can pitch in, too! We’ve posted a call for test projects on Twitter and would appreciate links to any open source projects you are working on in CLion.

Remote work, WSL

After a general investigation of the topic, we’ve come up with a plan to introduce remote development support in CLion. This will all start with support for Windows Subsystem for Linux, so that our Windows users can benefit from Linux toolchains. The general mechanism will also serve as a preparation for further remote development support in CLion.

CMake & other project models

CMake is growing impressively, and we are thrilled to see this trend continue over the past years (per Google Trends, 11/11/2014 thru 11/12/2017):

However, there are other worthy project models in the C & C++ development world that seem to be quite popular, and custom project models are used in many projects as well. This is why we are finally starting to decouple CMake from CLion. This will allow for supporting new popular project models, as well as an API for those who’d like to implement plugins for custom project models for CLion.

Plans for CLion 2018.1

• C++ support
  • Continue with the overhaul in the major areas
  • Extend support for C++17
  • Fix bugs and regressions
• Performance
  • Reduce IDE freezes
• Project model
  • Decouple CMake from CLion; start preparing a project model API
• Editor
  • Code fold of control flow statements (if/else, do/while, for, switch)
• Remote development
  • WSL support
  • Remote debug via SSH (w/o gdbserver)
• Debugger
  • Hex view
  • Memory view
• Tools
  • Support for Google Sanitizers
  • Clang-Tidy
    • Tuning default profile (set of enabled checks)
    • Support for options and configuration files
  • Support for CTest (likely will be ready for 2018.2)

As usual, your feature requests are welcome in our tracker.

Your CLion Team

JetBrains
The Drive to Develop

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