What’s Next? CLion 2019.3 Roadmap

Anastasia Kazakova

CLion 2019.2 landed just a few days ago. Do check it out if you haven’t yet! It’s got a lot of cool things for Embedded developers, an experimental debugger for the MSVC toolchain, a more flexible and reliable Unused Includes check, parameter code hints, and much more. Here is a fantastic video from Phil Nash to quickly take you through the key highlights.

Meanwhile, we are moving forward and thinking through our future updates and the next release. But before we share our plans, let’s take a minute to give our sincerest thanks to the most active evaluators, who helped us make v2019.2 more stable and accurate.

Special thanks

We want to thank all the users – more than 4 thousand in total! – who participated in the 2019.2 Early Access Program. You helped us immensely with the huge variety of possible setups and configurations, and even a few general issues we somehow missed. We greatly appreciate your help!

Continuing our ongoing tradition, we present our most active EAP evaluators with a full 1-year subscription to CLion, which can be redeemed as a new subscription or an extension of a current one. So, here are the contributors that we want to give special thanks:

• Dmytro Nezhevenko
• Ivan Stepanov
• Patrick Turley

You will receive a personal email with details on how to claim your license. (If for some reason you do not get an email from us within a week, ping us here in the comments!)

CLion 2019.3 roadmap

We take application performance and code quality very seriously. Following the internal performance week / hackathon that our team held together with the IntelliJ Platform team this June, we are now planning a special Quality-targeted Release. Here’s what that means in simple words:

1. We’ll work to flesh out and implement the fresh ideas and fixes we tried during our performance hackathon.
2. We plan to work intensively on various performance boosts, including some massive overhauls we started earlier this year. You can expect a series of blog posts covering the progress and explaining the underlying ideas, with some measurements on referenced projects so that you can compare them with your cases.
3. We plan to focus on fixing issues and eliminating pain-points in different areas, rather than introducing new functionality. (Don’t forget to upvote the pain-points that affect you the most, so that we can prioritize them to help as many users as possible!)
4. We still plan to continue our work in the directions we feel are important, such as covering Makefiles support and some others. Please read on for the details.

The following is a detailed plan for the next release cycle.

• C++ language support
  • Mostly bug-fixing and performance improvements as mentioned above.
  • Rework an action to switch header/source (CPP-12920).
  • Deeper integration with the Clangd-based engine, especially in the areas where it helps eliminate performance issues and lags (for example, Clangd-based code completion).
  • Investigation and fixes for various crashes and memory leaks in Clangd-based engine.
• Project model
  • Built-in Makefiles support (to substitute for the current flow of managing Makefiles projects).
  • CMake defaults for new projects (CPP-1887).
  • Use CMake File API (CPP-8238) to allow using Ninja and other generators (CPP-2659).
• Remote development
  • Investigate WSL v2 support opportunities (CPP-16543).
  • Remote debugging with gdbserver via ssh (CPP-7050).
  • Performance improvements for remote mode.
• Debugger
  • Improve the quality of the experimental debugger for Microsoft Visual C++ toolchain (you can expect some NatVis related fixes in 2019.2.x updates already).
  • Support for .gdbinit/.lldbinit located in project folders.
  • Input/output redirection (CPP-3153).
  • Performance investigations and improvements.
• Embedded Development
  • Mostly bug-fixing (which means your feedback on the recently added functionality will be very important!).
  • Console for GDBServer (CPP-15392, CPP-7103).
• Code coverage
  • llvm-cov/gcov integration (similar to what was recently added in AppCode).

Do you have any new feature requests? Please send them to our tracker. We’re listening!

Your CLion Team

JetBrains
The Drive to Develop

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