As you noted, C++ refactoring is an extremely difficult problem. You have to contend with macros, templates, and the liberties the compiler vendors have taken with the language spec. We designed our approach around a strong parsing and type analysis engine, and consequently it is very sensitive to the code that it is processing.

When I wrote our Cool Features document, I consciously left off the C++ Refactoring because it doesn’t work for all codebases and still struggles with some situations. If it worked as well as the features currently listed, it would definitely have made the list.

We are continuing to enhance the engine and work on additional “quick” refactorings that are based on our tagging engine. As you pointed out in the review, we consider these to be less “robust”. That doesn’t mean that they are more fragile, but that they may make changes that are not strictly accurate, where the regular refactorings will do more analysis to weed out these cases.

Unfortunately, we don’t provide access to the underlying representation of the code, as you have asked. Likewise, it would be very difficult to provide a means to allow users to write their own refactorings. But that’s a really great idea!

Feel free to contact me with ideas and questions. We’re a company of hard-core C++ programmers and we love to talk about coding!

They’ve had many things relatively early (first?) for example tags with pop up help since 1998? Of course some of that stuff is now built into VC++ but back then, especially when joining a project already in progress with a large unfamiliar code base it makes it extremely easy to jump around the code quickly. Pop into a function or structure def, follow it’s fields or variables, pop back out to where you were.

I’ve never had any real issues with support over the 12 years I’ve been using it. I’m sorry to hear you had trouble.

Of course programmers and editors are like religion so use whatever makes you happy and productive. This is probably a sad reason but I originally choose slickedit because it nearly perfectly emulated Brief. Something other editors claimed but all of them failed at. One thing I like about it (I’m sure some other editors can do this) is that you can configure it to never need a mouse. I can jump between windows, split them, join them etc. Open files, search, etc all without every touching a mouse and without having to tab around dialogs.

Anyways – the dual license for PC/Mac was the real kicker for me. I could’ve lived with the occasional crash(can’t be worse than VisualStudio….), but $600 out of my own pocket is beyond what I’m willing to spend on a tool

If you’re interested in C++ refactoring tools, you may want to try out Ref++:

http://www.ideat-solutions.com/index.htm

My experiences so far haven’t been great, but I’ve only tried it on a huge legacy codebase, which shall not be named.

- Kim

I was trying to build a refactoring/reflection/metaobjects system for C++ when I gave up on C++ and moved on to D. Ive never even heard of a language more difficult to parse than c++. You can parse D code with your eyes closed so building these tools are cake. No required forward references is more liberating than you can imagine and the compile times are 1/50th of c++. I think D is the future for game development.

Add to that the fact that I have a Mac laptop while I do most of my “work” work at a PC, and they want me to buy dual licenses for that setup. I’m not shelling out $600 for a buggy editor.