Best environment to develop?

[olivier1980]

Clion doesn't support scons, so I'm looking for other IDE's..what is the best way to do some debugging/building for a windows environment. Just using Visual Studio?

[vLKp]

I use a text editor, scons, gdb, and a terminal emulator in which to run gdb. A window manager that allows you to easily raise and lower the game and your development windows may also be useful. I do not develop on Windows, and only cross-compile for it.

[olivier1980]

Regarding cross-compiling, I don't think that's documented in the Install markdown yet?

[vLKp]

I find it surprising that a complete toolset for C and C++ development would be unable to run external build systems. Invocation of scons is sufficiently similar to GNU make that I configure my editor's Make integration to run scons instead, and it works fine. What problems did you encounter trying to use scons?

[olivier1980]

Well with my limited C++ experience I haven't tried a lot so far, it's just that the official documentation says it doesn't support it out of the box: https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/207252755-Which-build-systems-are-supported-Do-you-plan-to-support-any-other-build-systems

[vLKp]

I see the issue now. CLion is discussing this in the context of wanting to know how the compiler is invoked (for the benefit of its syntax highlighting and similar), not in the context of building the program (where you only want to produce a runnable program). Yes, extracting that from an SConstruct file would be difficult, which is why I added support for the clang compile_commands feature, back before the SCons project wrote and released a similar option. Set compilation_database=compile_commands.json to invoke the feature I wrote. It seemed to work properly with clang tools back when I used it. I've never used CLion, so I don't know if they can consume it, but I would hope so.

[vLKp]

Regarding cross-compiling, I don't think that's documented in the Install markdown yet?

Correct. Cross-compilation is a complex topic. The short form is that you should prepare in your cross-toolchain the headers and libraries for the target platform, then pass CXX=/path/to/cross-g++, CHOST=cross-host-tuple, PKG_CONFIG=/path/to/cross-pkg-config so that SConstruct picks up the cross-toolchain.