Every Flavour Beans

Wascana Desktop Developer is a completely standalone, Eclipse-based C++ development environment for the Windows platform which packages everything that is needed for developing applications using the C++ language. Download the installer, go through the installation wizard and you have a complete C++ IDE ready to go; unlike EasyEclipse for C++, no additional software or any further configuration is needed. It is based on the popular Eclipse platform and uses the CDT plugin and the MinGW compiler tools to provide the necessary functionality. Called CDT for Windows earlier, it is now renamed to Wascana Desktop Developer to avoid any trademark issues. The latest version, Wascana 0.9.3, was released a few days ago and it comes with the following components integrated into it:

1. Rich development environment of the Eclipse platform.
2. Eclipse CDT Plugin.
3. MinGW and MSYS C++ development tools.
4. wxWidgets and SDL C++ libraries.

Wascana is currently under active development mode and I am guessing that the version ready to be used by a typical user would be released as Wascana 1.0. Those who are interested can download and try it out right away, there is nothing scary in the 0.9.3 version and it is fully functional and extremely stable. What more is planned for the future? From Doug’s blog(Wascana’s creator), it looks like:

1. Integrated support for Boost.
2. More C++ libraries; like, perhaps, the game development library Ogre 3D.
3. Support for Microsoft compiler and debugger(MinGW and Cygwin are already there).
4. .NET support and a GUI Builder.
5. Support for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

So if you see the above list you realise that it is not going to be a thin layer of packaging to just integrate the Eclipse and MinGW tools together, but rather going to be a complete, rich development environment for C++ developers, which in future might become, according to Wascana’s creator, as good an IDE as Microsoft Visual C++ for Windows, perhaps with full community involvement. Except for (5) above, I am excited about the future roadmap of Wascana.

Things I personally would like to see in the future versions of Wascana:

1. Good support for Unit testing. CppUnit, CxxTest, almost anything will do.
2. Some of the popular C++ libraries: Boost, ACE, Loki etc.
3. More C++ related plugins like Doxygen. [Plugins to enable profiling, static analysis and logging support would be good too.]
4. SCons-Builder! I know that every C++ programmer has his own favourite build tool(bjam, cmake, nmake, etc) but SCons is too good to be ignored I believe.
5. Test support for CVS as well as Subversion plugins. Not high priority.

Much of the above stuff should actually be better supported by the core Eclipse C++ project(Eclipse + CDT) but I will not be the one complaining if they are instead well supported by the other Eclipse based C++ IDEs like Wascana, EasyEclipse etc :) Also, I don’t expect all of the above to be an integral part of a future Wascana release(except Boost and unit testing libraries); if they are tested thoroughly enough to make sure that they work well with every new Wascana release, it would work for me. This lack of documentation regarding which versions of plugins work with which versions of Eclipse has been the biggest gripe for me.

[I will make a proper dream-list of the features I would like to see in what could be my perfect C++ IDE and will post it in a separate blog entry.]

Getting Started with Wascana Desktop Developer 0.9.3

To try Wascana out, download the latest version from Wascana’s sourceforge.net page. Go through the installation wizard and when finished, run the application from the Start menu(or use the Desktop shortcut).

From inside Wascana, create a new C++ project(File -> C++ Project; Makefile Project -> Hello World C++ Project -> MinGW GCC) and try to build it.

Project -> Build Project will build it. Run -> Run as Local C/C++ Application will create the run configuration and then will run the application(Ctrl-F11 will run it from the next time). (Edit first if you frown like me at the default generated code. When starting a real C++ project though, you can either create an empty C++ project or import an existing project using File -> Import…).

More Options in Wascana

As you can see, we have created an example C++ project, built it and run it in Wascana Desktop Developer without having to download and install MinGW/MSYS or any other software and without having to bother setting up the PATH variable. Of course, if you want to use your own version of MinGW toolchain, you can override the packaged MinGW version by preceding/replacing path to Wascana’s MinGW/MSYS with that of yours in Wascana preferences(Project -> Properties):

Need to run some tool from the command line outside of Wascana? Run MSYS command line tool that comes with Wasacana(Start -> Wascana -> Wascana MSYS or Desktop shortcut):

Last Words

Wascana is a great idea in its current form and has the potential to become one of the best C++ development environments in the future. I do hope that (1) the support for Windows application development in the future versions of Wascana won’t come in the way of pure C++ development(where GUI or Microsoft library support is not needed) and (2) even if Doug offers a commercial version of it in the future, a community version is always made available. Keep a watch on the blog of Doug Schaefer, Wascana’s creator and an Eclipse CDT developer, for more information.