Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Ma Leeo and Lumia for the clue delivery! IT House, Nov. 13 (Xinhua)-- JetBrains has launched a new C language and C++ developer IDE-CLion Nova, using the ReSharper C++/Rider C++ language engine instead of the original "old" CLion engine.

A preview of CLion Nova is now available through the official Toolbox app. Sometime in 2024, based on the feedback collected, CLion Nova will be merged into CLion. Prior to this, the preview version will be free to use and can be installed in parallel with the original CLion, which can be downloaded and experienced by IT House partners.

According to reports, JetBrains's first C++ engine was designed for AppCode (IDE for iOS and macOS developers). It is part of the IntelliJ platform and was originally written in Java and later in Kotlin. The method and architecture of the engine can well serve multiple languages in IntelliJ-based IDE; however, it turns out that this design is not the most suitable for the C++ language.

In order to adapt to the development of C++ more quickly and separate the engine from the IDE process, a clangd-based engine was later added to CLion. The engine is built on a custom branch of clangd that detects any warnings and errors, displays and recommends quick fixes in the editor, and performs highlighting, completion, and certain navigation operations. It is also used for data flow analysis and MISRA checking. At the same time, CLion's "legacy" engine is responsible for other code review functions.

Clangd has many advantages, but it is not very helpful when it comes to project-wide refactoring and manipulation. Another alternative developed for C++ by JetBrains is the language engine used in ReSharper C++ and Rider (for C++ game development). There is also a communication protocol that enables IntelliJ-based IDE, such as Rider, to communicate with independent back-end processes that act as language engines. Officials have now adapted this agreement and the original engine to CLion.

In this new experimental solution, officials focus on the responsiveness, accuracy, and performance of IDE, with two main goals:

Solve the long-standing performance and quality problems caused by the use of "old" engines in CLion.

Unify the user experience for all C++ tools, namely CLion, Rider, and ReSharper C++.

Therefore, the new preview version of the experiment is officially named CLion Nova, and the current version of CLion is CLion Classic. In the future, officials plan to merge CLion Nova into CLion Classic, and no new products are expected to be launched.

CLion Nova still uses two C++ language engines: one based on clangd, and the other used by ReSharper C++/Rider.

Most of the functions of CLion Classic are expected to work exactly the same in CLion Nova. The most obvious performance advantages of CLion Nova are:

Faster highlighting, especially in cases of incremental code updates

A more responsive user interface

Find usage faster

Significant reduction in freezing and suspending in refactoring

Faster test index

This unification also brings some new features to CLion Nova that are not included in the CLion Classic feature set:

New refactorings, such as introducing fields, introducing namespace aliases, introducing using enumerations, and converting to scope enumerations.

New checks, quick fixes, and intentions, such as redundancy qualifiers, replacing auto with explicit type declarations, and sorting of # include instructions.

New code hints, such as preprocessing instruction hints and Push-to-Hint mode.

Unlike CLion Classic, CLion Nova does not use clangd to implement core IDE functions such as code completion or highlighting. However, the clangd branch of JetBrains still runs with the new engine to perform a variety of tasks (ClangFormat, Clang-Tidy, MISRA inspection, data flow analysis, and so on).

When CLion Classic users start using CLion Nova, there are some new experience changes:

Some of the ways IDE reacts differently when the user types.

Some UI elements and settings related to the code review feature may appear to be in an unfamiliar location.

Some code-related settings may have different default values in CLion Nova. When you start for the first time, CLion Nova will migrate some by project and by application settings from CLion Classic, but not all of them.

Switching between different language configurations (that is, debugging / release) may take more time for the code inspection engine to keep up. There is also no option to switch the parsing context for each file.

ReSharper C++ is only available for Windows, while Rider is cross-platform. However, the ReSharper C++/Rider engine may not be able to support non-Windows environments as seamlessly as Windows environments.

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