During the recent Q&A session on Reddit, we got a surprising number of questions about our plans for Meson support. Today we are going to show you how you can already use Meson-based projects in CLion. For this we will use compilation database support in CLion. Meson is a relatively new build system that strives to be fast yet simple to use. It converts build scripts written in a Python-like language into one of the backend build systems: Ninja (the default and recommended one), Visual Studio, or Xcode. Recently Meson has started to gain popularity among C++ developers. CLion currently doe

In the first post of this series, we built a simple prototype project using an Arduino board. This second stage involves constructing a full-featured device that can display the current temperature and pressure with an atmospheric pressure chart, and can run off a single battery for several weeks. The source code is available on GitHub, and readers can follow along with the text in this post commit-by-commit. Hardware Hardware modding Full circuit assembly Firmware Configuring peripherals Writing code Power consumption MCU configuration changes to optimize power consumption F

This post is intended for CLion plugin authors. It explains what has changed during the 2020.3 release cycle and how you need to adjust your plugin. While CLion doesn’t provide any public plugin API for C/C++-related subsystems, a number of great plugins have been made using the limited API available. We’re very grateful to the authors for their efforts. If you have an idea about building a plugin for CLion or any other IntelliJ-based IDEs, please refer to the documentation, which will be updated shortly to reflect the contents of this post. You’ll find useful advice as well as a few sample pl

With CMake 3.15 it has become possible to use the Clang compiler on Windows with a GNU-style command line. This also means that it's possible to use Clang with the Mingw-w64 toolchain. While it’s possible to configure Clang with the Mingw-w64 (or MinGW) toolchain, if you decide to use Clang from the LLVM repo, it won’t work correctly. This is because LLVM Clang for Windows is built using Microsoft Visual Studio, and all the built-in macros and include search paths are set up for use with Visual Studio. So even when used with the MinGW toolchain, it will still try to include MSVC standard libra

As International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) sponsors and continuous supporters of many educational initiatives, JetBrains thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to run JetBrains Knowledge Day 2020 last week. This was a unique educational event to mark the beginning of the ICPC competitive season and academic year. Phil Nash, JetBrains C++ Tools developer advocate, gave a talk on using CLion since C++ is widely used in both competitive programming and education. This talk introduces some of the CLion features that can supercharge your coding. It covers completions, including smart comple

An important part of writing code is debugging. Despite the name this is not limited to just finding bugs in our code, but can help us to understand what the code is actually doing at runtime - often in a specific environment. While it's possible to do this to some extent using, so-called, "printf-debugging" (inserting code to write out messages and values to the console or a log file), that process is tedious, time-consuming, and very limited. Using a debugger well can make an order of magnitude difference in productivity at this stage - so it would be a shame not to learn our debugging tools

CLion comes with powerful debugger integration, giving you access to backend debuggers such as GDB and LLDB via a uniform UI. The IDE helps you debug efficiently with its built-in variables view, a variety of stepping and breakpoints options, evaluation of expressions, and memory and assembler views. With CLion 2020.3 EAP, we’ve added a new powerful option to control the execution flow during debugging – Set Execution Point. You might be aware of this feature if you’ve ever used Set Next Statement in Visual Studio or Jump to Line in IntelliJ IDEA. In brief, it allows you to move the execution

Our latest global developer survey shows that Google Test, Catch2, and Boost.Test are the three most popular frameworks for unit testing. CLion supports all of these, as well as doctest. We also know that CMake is the most trending project model in the C++ world. CTest, a testing tool distributed as part of CMake, is used to automate unit testing, which entails running tests and uploading the results to a dashboard. Looking at CTest as a CMake-specific test runner, you may think of it as something similar to CLion’s built-in test runner (even though it isn’t quite a straightforward comparison)

There are many useful changes and improvements planned for CLion 2020.3, and today we are ready to share some of them with you. CLion officially starts the 2020.3 Early Access Program today! For those who just joined us, EAP builds are free and valid for 1 month, so you don’t need an active subscription to try them out. However, the quality of EAP builds is usually lower than that of releases. If you are wondering why taking part in an EAP is worth your while, please see this nice explanation by the WebStorm team. DOWNLOAD CLION 2020.3 EAP Build 203.3645.37 is available from our website, via t

We hope you had a chance to join us in our virtual room at CppCon 2020. The productivity demo by Phil Nash was recorded, so if you missed it live you can check it out now. 00:00 - Intro 00:48 - Project models intro 01:23 - Create New Class 02:09 - Rename 03:30 - Auto-import 04:10 - Code generation: generate constructor 05:10 - Clang-Tidy 05:51 - Code generation: operator generation 07:08 - Navigation through the code 08:10 - Search Everywhere 09:40 - Find Action 10:50 - Reformat Code 11:19 - Local History 12:30 - Questions time Check out JetBrains TV channel on YouTube for other product relat

Many developers are playing with Arduino-based projects these days. Arduino is easy to get started with, and the experience of seeing the outcome of your coding efforts in a light blinking or robot moving is delightful. But most of these Arduino developers don’t move forward. They keep working on their projects as weekend warriors, treating them simply as small hobbies and side projects. In this series of blog posts we’d like to explore how you can bring your pet projects to a more professional level and how IDEs like CLion can help you do that. What we’re going to build We’ve set ourselves an

On June 23 we ran a live webinar, “CLion 101 and Beyond”. Phil Nash demonstrated how to install CLion and get up and running with it quickly, and gave an overview of the top productivity-boosting features you should check out first. The recording of the webinar is now available on the JetBrainsTV YouTube channel. Here are some useful timestamps so you can quickly jump to the section you’re most interested in: 01:42 – Installation & Initial setup, configuring toolchains 14:43 – Create a New Project, Build and Run 17:11 – Toolbox App 18:30 – Windows setup, configuring the toolchains