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

CLion 2020.2 EAP2 brings long-awaited Makefile project support. While it’s still in its early stages with various limitations and known issues, it’s good enough to cope with a long list of projects already. Do you have a Makefile project? Grab the free EAP build and give it a try now. Share your feedback with us! In this blog post we’ll answer: How does it work under the hood? How to start with your Makefile project in CLion? What can I do if something goes wrong and my project fails to load correctly? What are the known issues and limitations? (more…)

In the C++ ecosystem there is more than one unit testing framework. Google Test is the one used the most. Boost.Test is obviously gaining in popularity among the Boost community. Catch(2) is relatively new but also growing impressively. Meanwhile, several years ago at CppCon there was an inspiring presentation by Viktor Kirilov of yet another framework called doctest. Viktor told our audience about it in the guest blog post in ReSharper C++ blog, once the support was added there. In a nutshell, doctest is a fast single-header framework, with self-registering tests. It’s safe: uses thread-sa

In May 2019, the JetBrains team attended several events in Israel. We were inspired by the fantastic and welcoming C++ community in Tel Aviv, the old city of Jaffa, and Haifa. While the main goal of the trip was a brand-new conference – Core C++ (check out the trip report), we also had a great evening at the Haifa::C++ meetup and even ran our own event – JetBrains Night Tel Aviv 2019! We gave several talks there on C++ and .NET development in general and our tools in particular. In this blog post, we’d like to highlight one of those talks. What does it mean to be productive when developing

You’ve probably heard that dogfooding at JetBrains is a mission-critical part of our development process. You may also know that we build our own JetBrains Runtime to provide a runtime environment for running IntelliJ-based products. It’s based on OpenJDK, and so, obviously, it’s a great opportunity for dogfooding in CLion. Besides, there is a huge community contributing to OpenJDK that often asks about tips & tricks for dealing with the native part of the OpenJDK project in CLion. There are already several tried and tested collections of tips & tricks from the community leads. In this

Update: Makefile projects support is now public in CLion 2020.2. What request in our tracker has more than 1000 votes, 370 comments, and 800 watchers? You guessed it: Support Makefile projects. This has been a story of interesting findings, semi-automatic workarounds, and a long battle that we still plan to win! If you’d like to get the latest news on this topic, please read on. From past to present: the evolution of project models in CLion Support for Makefile projects: How-to Option 1: Compiler wrappers Option 2: LD_PRELOAD Option 3: Parse the output of Make Support fo