Hey CLion, quick: Catch!
cover image by Eric Kilby , licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
I am glad I finally made up my mind and bought a personal license for CLion.
And just one day after CLion 1.1 came out.
A few episodes of CppCast had left me with some interesting sounding projects I had meant to take a look at.
One of them was Catch, with its promise of low setup cost, compared to other testing frameworks.
I quickly got it running in CLion. It really is easy to set up, being a single header file.
This is what the CLion window looks like in distraction free mode (I really like that mode) and after running it:
Clion running a small Catch test project
Looks good, but since I'm really nit picky, heres a list of a few issues I would like to see fixed:
1 - Creating a second test cases confuses CLion's code parser to the point where it thinks we are defining a duplicate function.
I get this warning message (only in the IDE, not when actually compiling, of course):
2 - Side effects of thinking the test case is a duplicate function
Any method, variable, etc used in that test is marked as unused. Note how someOtherMethod is greyed out.
Sidebar is filled with these errors/warnings, which here are pretty harmless, but in more complex scenarios have all the drawbacks of false positives.
3 - Built in console does not support ANSI color codes.
This one is really a small issue, but it annoys me anyway.
I remember QtCreator used to have this exact same issue, but it got fixed a while back.
C++ is a complex language to parse, and CLion gets a lot of it right, most of the time.
I'm hoping to see this great IDE improve quickly in the next releases.