A quick follow up on my earlier post about the state of Linux development (itself a follow up of David Goemans' post on "Linux Development, is it ready for mainstream?"), the question must be asked: why isn't there a solid IDE for the Linux platform?
This is not a rhetorical question... I'd really like to know. I've seen my Microsoft programmer friends (yes, I have some) using their Visual Studio and other IDEs, and I've thought "surely Linux can get something like this going."
The usual response to this query has been, "well, there's always Eclipse." And from what I can tell, IBM's development toolset is indeed a worthy contender for a general Linux IDE. But a lot of Linux developers still shun the notion, preferring instead to use their text editors.
The problem does not lie in the feature set of existing IDEs, but rather in the problem that even if you choose one to use, developing your code on it hardly matters if you can't specifically code towards the Linux distribution you use. No IDE--yet--universally does that for all Linux distros.
But, there will be progress made soon. In the next version of the Linux Standard Base, there will be a new software development kit that will now only let you code and compile LSB 4.0-compliant applications, but will also let you code for previous versions of the LSB--without switching to a new SDK.
This cross-LSB SDK means that if there were ever a time for software vendors to think about putting together a cross-distro IDE, it would be now. Access to multiple versions of the LSB in a single SDK means access to a whole lot of Linux distributions, right out of the box.
Maybe this will be the start of something big.
A Bit More on this IDE Issue...
6 comments
(2 votes)
Submitted on Wed, 01/21/2009 - 22:40.
