What IDE to use for C++ on a Mac (Xcode is **not** an option)

Engineering NuPIC
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Hi,

I’ve decided to bite the bullet and invite PTSD into my life by starting down the road to learning C++ in order to fully understand nupic.core. :stuck_out_tongue:

Can any nupic.core developers who use a Mac, recommend an IDE / toolchain ? What is used at Numenta?

Thanks ahead of time!

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Normally when you want an IDE the first place to look is in the https://www.jetbrains.com/ product range.

They have a pretty cool one for c/c++ called Clion

edit: If you want a free one and still not use the awesome Xcode you can check out:
http://codelite.org

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@Mousi

Thanks! I wonder what nupic.core devs think of Clion? I’ve heard Xcode doesn’t have refactoring and call-tree searching that (normal) IDEs have? …or were those older comments I saw on stackoverflow and elsewhere?

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Well, here’s what I use:

  • A basic text editor for coding. It’s either Vim or Emacs, I’m not gonna be more specific. :slight_smile:
  • Xcode for little playground experiments, like when I’m fiddling with templates or function pointers or lambdas.
  • lldb for stepping through code.
  • Instruments (which comes with XCode) for profiling. The Time Profiler is pretty great for profiling nupic.core code, you just start a Python process, hit record, and it tells you everything.

I’m not an extremist. Some day I’ll probably become enlightened and switch to an IDE. And visual debugging environments are definitely better than command line environments, I just haven’t taken the time to figure out how to get them working with nupic.core, and I like how simple it is to just say “lldb python my_file.py” and be able to set breakpoints and go. Sometimes when I’m feeling crazy I use pdb and lldb at the same time, hitting both Python and C++ breakpoints.

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I’m just starting out with Numenta’s technology. But, I was an avid developer on Mac OS X for years. Like you, I started out on XCode, because it’s Apple’s. :slight_smile:

Then I got brave enough to venture out into IDE land and developed for 2 years in Eclipse, then tried NetBeans, several different text editors and finally discovered CLion by JetBrains.

I love CLion. It’s stable, fast, easy to use and has many features I’ve been pleasantly surprised by. I’d recommend it hands down compared with all the others I’ve used. It costs a few bucks, but in my opinion it’s well worth it.

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