What’s Next? The CLion 2023.2 Roadmap

Anastasia Kazakova

CLion 2023.1 was released a few weeks ago. It brought a solution for package management, took your debugging experience to the next level, helped with QML coding, and included a host of improvements for the new UI. Check out the key updates on our site if you missed them, and give the new version a try.

In preparation for CLion 2023.2 and 2023.3, we’d like to share our plans, as well as the ideas and directions we’ll be working on over the next few months. In general, our plan for the 2023.2 release is to polish and finalize many of the improvements we started delivering in 2023.1. You can consider the 2023.2 release as a quality-focused release for CLion.

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 of the issues listed below will be addressed in CLion 2023.2.

There is ongoing work for the IntelliJ platform to polish the new UI and eliminate UI freezes. CLion will benefit from both of these improvements, even though the changes apply to all IntelliJ-based IDEs and are not CLion-specific. Regarding CLion-specific improvements, here is our plan for this year:

• C++ language support
• Integration with vcpkg
• CMake integration
• Enhanced debugger
• Embedded development

C++ language support

An experimental Clangd-based indexer was added in CLion 2023.1 to help make Find Usages in the C++ code faster and more accurate. Our users have reported significant improvements from it, but the new indexer is still unstable – we plan to polish and stabilize it. We also plan to implement a user-friendly crash report mechanism so that you can report the issues you meet more easily and we can address them faster.

The experimental Clangd-based indexer will also come to Fleet soon.

There is ongoing work to optimize the performance of built-in data flow analysis in CLion. It will be continued in 2023.

Integrations: vcpkg

CLion 2023.1 integrated vcpkg. We hosted a round of UX sessions to determine if the integration is convenient for our users, and they find it helpful. Based on this feedback, we plan to introduce the following changes:

• Improved support for Manifest mode: In the initial release, we were mostly focused on the support for Classic mode since it’s easier to use for projects starting with vcpkg from scratch. But Manifest mode is also important and we want to support it in CLion.
• Improve integration with vcpkg for projects already using it:
  • Improve the indication that vcpkg is enabled in the project (CPP-32521, CPP-32524, CPP-32520).
  • Introduce an easier way to enable vcpkg for profiles (CPP-32522).
• Allow installing a specific package version in vcpkg (CPP-32519).

Integrations: CMake

There are the following plans to improve CMake integration and make the user experience more productive:

• The ability to add a new CMake target from the New C++ File dialog (CPP-31483).
• Support for CMake 3.25’s blocks (CPP-32126).
• Parameter Info for CMake commands (CPP-30016).
• Other small tasks with CMake code insight.

Debugger

• Disassemble on demand landed in CLion 2023.1. We now plan to launch UX sessions and collect user feedback to see if there is room for improvement. Let us know if you have tried the feature and have any feedback on it!
• We will continue with the Memory View improvements we started this year. Some of them were already released in 2023.1, while others are coming later this year. The biggest one is to make the memory view editable (CPP-27163).
• We plan to add the ability to inspect register values in CLion (CPP-6988).
• We plan to proceed with the task of Qt type renderers in CLion (CPP-605).
• We will proceed with the Emulate terminal feature in CLion. For example, terminal emulation doesn’t currently work when running a local process with admin privileges.

Embedded development

We are currently working on improving the existing PlatformIO integration. The main effort is to make the PlatformIO experience more native, making it unnecessary to generate CMake projects.

That’s it! Have an idea for a feature? Share it with us in the issue tracker or in the comments.

Your CLion team
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