Current Best Suggestions for C++ Compiler / IDE?

[stratum]

Codeblocks is OK in such oddball platforms. Works with almost any compiler.
With Wine you can only target Wine, though. It's not a good test case for targeting Windows. Its API emulation is far from being perfect. As for the compiler, any compiler which can compile Wine from its source code is OK. On Linux GCC is the most common one. You can link libwine (whatever its name actually is) and generate a typical Linux executable with Windows API's. Or possibly you can compile GCC from its source code, and have a cross compiler for Windows working under Linux (MinGW is a good source for the needed Windows libraries for this case). Perhaps MinGW compiler itself could work on Linux under Wine and can generate Windows executables. Either way in the end this route doesn't really make sense because in any case you'll need to test that plugin on Windows, possibly on several different versions with several different hosts (you'll find that 'slmgr -rearm' feature to be handy in this case, as buying a license for each version of Windows just for testing probably won't make much sense). That's why it's a waste of time. Plus, nothing beats the Visual Studio debugger

[antto]

Code::Blocks is a flexible IDE, it runs on windows/linux/etc.. and supports a bunch of compilers, and also external makefiles
on windows, you could use the M$ compiler, or MinGW gcc
on linux you can probably use a cross-compiler (mingw) directly, so you can code your plugins in the coazy environment
but i also think that using Wine as a testing substitute for windows is probably not a good idea
using a cross-compiler can minimize the time you have to spend running windows (only during testing)

[mystran]

You could also just use one of the more flexible text editors (eg. Atom, Sublime and VSCode are popular if you're not into Vim or Emacs). Personally I use Atom on OSX and the work-flow is just about as efficient as Visual Studio on Windows (until you need a debugger, but there's nothing really that can match the VS debugger).

[syntonica]

I use Xcode since it's free and has an okay debugger. I'm just looking for a basic, yet possibly complete Windows solution that will run in Wine. As long as the compiler spits out a line number for an error, I won't necessarily need a debugger since the majority of code already has been debugged. There's just a few lines of Windows-specific code that I need to massage.

I was hoping someone else had gone down this road before me and could point the way and save me from hitting the potholes and taking wrong turns. Looks like that is a negatory, though...

[gnjp]

I use XCode mainly. Clion is a nice Mac/Windows C++ IDE, with lots of advanced features. For quick Windows tests i use Visual Studio in Parallels, though it works fine in Virtualbox (free) is you have a quick enough mac.

[metamorphosis]

Visual Studio 2017 hands down. You won't be able to find anything better for free.

*PFFFFT*

Bullshit.

Codelite + Nuwen Mingw (which is put together by one of the main MS devs).
"hands down".

[Miles1981]

Codelite + Nuwen Mingw (which is put together by one of the main MS devs).
"hands down".

An IDE that can't handle projects (no CMake support) and that uses the "great" GDB for debugging?
hahahaha.

[quikquak]

VS has a great text editor, I especially like the the way I can edit collumns and remove square blocks of code without the need to grab a mouse - Just hold Shift and Alt & cursor select.

[syntonica]

Visual Studio 2017 hands down. You won't be able to find anything better for free.

*PFFFFT*

Bullshit.

Codelite + Nuwen Mingw (which is put together by one of the main MS devs).
"hands down".

Interesting! Why have I never heard of this Earth-thing called Codelite? Will have to give it a try to see if it can break the Xcode hegemony since Xcode is zero-configurable.

[stratum]

I have given it a try.
Looks like you have to spend an hour configuring it before it works:)

[syntonica]

I opened up an Xcode project in it and it compiled right away using clang. I even tried the MacBundler, but it doesn't actually make a bundle, it just stubs out the main plist file and creates an icon. I would have to extend that plugin for it to work properly to build an app/vst automatically.

Codelite editor is pretty nice with proper code folding at the bracket level, not Xcode's utterly pointless and poorly executed method level. But this seems to be the only advantage so far.

So, it's not quite an Xcode killer, but could be with a little work. However, it's closer than anything else, except maybe the Jetbrains clone.

[stratum]

It has a few problems on windows, it couldn't use the microsoft compiler as it is (version problem probably) and with mingw it was OK but didn't detect gdb automatically. Not bad and probably not better than codeblocks (I didn't spent much time with it, though). My only problem with codeblocks (I use it on linux) is that if you edit the text file locations in the 'find in files' result set, line numbers are not updated automatically so you have to search again to find the exact line locations after editing the related text files. If codelite does this better it would be an improvement (I didn't try).

edit: 'Find in files' works better in Codelite and it updates the line numbers as text files are edited.

[camsr]

After using notepad for a few days, I think keyword highlighting is the #1 missed feature. #2 would be file tabs. #3 is probably autocompletion.

I've been using MinGWx64 for my plugins. https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/

[mystran]

After using notepad for a few days, I think keyword highlighting is the #1 missed feature. #2 would be file tabs. #3 is probably autocompletion.

I actually tend to miss rainbow parens a lot more than traditional syntax highlight. You need Viasfora (well, there's probably other choices too) to get it into Visual Studio, but once you get used to those it feels really miserable not having them.

That said, writing any non-trivial amount of code without auto-indenting (and reindenting) would be pretty terrible really. Fortunately that's something you can usually find in almost any editor (as well as tabs and clang-autocomplete).

[stratum]

It's a bit odd that there isn't a single really good C++ IDE for linux.
The last time I had tried Eclipse was unusable because of the directory structure it insisted on having, Netbeans was a memory hog, and QT-creator didn't have an option to set command line arguments for the program to be run, and none had support for multi-process debugging.