What Is Our Focus for CLion 2021.3?

Anastasia Kazakova

With CLion v2021.2 being recently released, we are now collecting feedback and working on the most important bug-fixes. It’s also time to start the new development cycle, so let’s see what we will be busy with in the next 3–4 months.

Special thanks

Before we talk about the plans, we’d like to first thank all of the participants of our recently finished Early Access Program! We are very grateful for every piece of your feedback, as it helps us polish and fine-tune the final release in many environments. As a special thank you to the most active EAPers, we’ll send them a special JetBrains gift box! Congratulations to:

• Eyal Amir
• Clare Macrae
• Jiawen Geng
• Roland Illig

We’ll email you in the next few days regarding your postal address and some other details for delivery.

Roadmap for CLion 2021.3

IDE performance and responsiveness is our major priority. To improve them, we keep inspecting user snapshots and thread dumps, as well as testing CLion on various projects on our side. There are many new ideas and approaches we keep experimenting with in our roadmap, and we’ll deliver when we are sure that these experiments bring significant value to our users.

The following is only a preliminary plan, as some tasks will be started but may not be finalized until after the actual release, or might be changed or rescheduled for various reasons. We cannot guarantee that all of the features listed below will be included in CLion 2021.3.

Talking about more specific directions for the upcoming release, we’d like to highlight the following activities:

• Toolchains
  • Bundle MinGW toolchain in CLion installer on Windows (CPP-25680).
  • Add the ability to configure the toolchain environment via script (CPP-11768).
• Project models
  • Bundle Ninja and use it as a default generator for CMake projects.
  • Continue with CMake Presets support, and maybe add support for CMake Presets version 3 (CPP-26183).
  • Fixes for Makefile projects and pre-configuration steps.
  • Automatically find executables corresponding to Makefile build targets (CPP-20678).
• Debugger
  • Improve the way long STL type names are presented in the debugger (CPP-22503, CPP-2693, CPP-2572).
  • Introduce a better way to present pointer variables in the debugger (aka “Show as array”, CPP-6550).
  • Improve hex formatting for numeric variables (for example, fix it for large numbers CPP-16289).
• Embedded
  • Custom compiler – a way to specify supported features, header search paths, defines, etc., if the compiler is not natively supported by CLion (CPP-9615).
  • Continue with multithreaded RTOS-aware debugging introduced in CLion 2021.2.
  • Improve the Peripheral view (CPP-18061, CPP-24854).
• Static analysis
  • Improve global DFA and Lifetimes analysis, cover more cases, and make it even more accurate.
• Annoying problems
  • Address the most annoying cases when automatic include directives are added inaccurately (CPP-5501).

Apart from this list, there are a few other experimental features we are working on. But since they are unlikely to be delivered in 2021.3, we’ll talk about them later.

If you have any new feature requests, please send them to our tracker. We’re listening!

Your CLion Team
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