Readme for the C/C++ plugin for IntelliJ IDEA

1. About the product

Advanced Tools is a small startup company, trying to develop a tool for C++ editing and refactoring. This version of plugin for IntelliJ IDEA is an early alpha-version, which was made open for public in order to better debug it (there is still a lot of work). In future there will be available versions for other popular IDEs.

We do not guarantee that your work with the product will be smooth (we hope that such plugin version will appear in near future). However, with some patience this tool can be helpful even in its current state.

2. Changes from the previous version

Version 0.8, 2010.10.03

Version 0.6

3. Setting up the plugin

Install the plugin. There will appear no special project type for C/C++ projects. Just take/create any Java project, and the plugin will process all *.c/*.cc/*.cpp source files from the project source roots.

Then you need to specify the C/C++ dialect. Open Settings->IDE Settings->C/C++. There are three options, which can be used for tuning:

To parse the files you also need to specify include paths for your C/C++ environment. Currently, the plugin can automatically detect GCC include paths, in case of other compilers you need to specify the include paths by yourself. Additional include files can be specified for each project separately. Automatic gcc include paths detection works only if your compiler presents in path. If it does not (or if you want to use include-paths of a non-default compiler), then you should specify the name (full name, if necessary) of gcc executable in GCC executable name field.

4. Working with the plugin

No additional tuning is necessary, the plugin should start working. The following features should work relatively reliably:

The following features are present, but should be used with care:

5. Performance and hardware requirements

For a project of about 200 thousand lines of C++ code with Windows API it should take about 20s for its full reparse on Pentium-IV 1700 under Windows XP. In case of 2 GHz quad-core processors full reparse takes about 5s.

The use of multi-core processors also improves responce, because it can effectively separate Java processes from plugin processes (this is especially important for Windows operating system).

6. Errors and reliability

Remember about responce delays: if the source is not highlighted, wait a bit, maybe it will change.

Error diagnostics may be not accurate.

As it was stated above, this is an alpha version of the plugin. The following problems can arise while working with the plugin:

7. Feedback and bugs reporting

If you have a question, suggestion, or you have a bug to reprot, then please email us at support@youradvancedtools.com. Also, our bug tracking server is accessible at bugs.adv-tools.com.