KDevelop 5.1.0 Released

 

KDevelop started life as a Linux based IDE created by the KDE group.  In the last year however it has expanded to have beta support for Windows while a Mac OS version is also under development.  They just released KDE 5.1.0 bringing tons of new features to the IDE including LLDB support, cppcheck, OpenCL language support, improved Python language support, in-IDE theme selection, Perforce integration and more.

 

Details from the release announcement:

LLDB support

We had a great student for GSoC 2016 implementing LLDB support in KDevelop. The end result is that we now have a debugger framework which can be used both for the GDB & LLDB MI communcation. The LLDB plugin teaches KDevelop to talk to the standalone LLDB MI Driver (lldb-mi); so now it’s possible to use LLDB as an alternative debugger backend for KDevelop. One interesting thing with LLDB that it’s also potentially useful on OS X & Windows for us, especially when the Windows port of LLDB is getting more and more stable.

Analyzer run mode

With 5.1, KDevelop got a new menu entry Analyzer which features a set of actions to work with analyzer-like plugins. During the last months, we merged analyzer plugins into kdevelop.git which are now shipped to you out of the box:

Cppcheck

Cppcheck is a well-known static analysis tool for C/C++ code. Cppcheck is useful for taking a closer look at your source code checking for common programming faults such as out of boundsKDevelop accesses, memory leaks, null pointer dereferences, uninitialized variables, etc. pp. With the Cppcheck integration in KDevelop running the cppcheck executable is just one click away. KDevelop will pass the correct parameters to cppcheck including potential include paths and other options.

Other analyzers in the pipeline: Valgrind, clang-tidy, krazy2

While the Cppcheck plugin is shipped out of the box, other analyzers are not considered 100% stable yet and still reside in their own repositories. The clang-tidy plugin looks super promising (another static analysis & refactoring tool for C/C++) as it really easy to use from the command-line and thus easy to integrate into our IDE. We plan to import more of those analyzers into kdevelop.git so they’ll be part of the kdevelop tarball and are thus available to you without having to install yet another package.

Initial OpenCL language support, CUDA support upcoming

Since 5.1 KDevelop is able to parse code written in the Open Computing Language (OpenCL). The OpenCL language support inside KDevelop is backed by our Clang-based language support backend and thus just required minimal changes in KDevelop to start supporting it. Support for handling NVidia’s CUDA files will be part of 5.2 instead. Stay tuned.

Note that for KDevelop to detect .cl files as OpenCL files, an up-to-date shared-mime-info package which contains this patch is required. Alternatively, you can add the mime type yourself by creating the file /usr/share/mime/text/x-opencl-src.xml with appropriate contents and re-running update-mime-database yourself.

Improved Python language support

Python language support now supports Python 3.6 syntax and semantics. In addition, thanks to the work of Francis Herne, various long-standing issues in the semantic analysis engine have been fixed:

  • Loops and comprehensions infer types correctly in many more cases, including on user-defined types with __iter__ and __next__ methods.
  • Type guessing works for arguments named by keywords (not only **kwargs), and works better for class/staticmethods.
  • Property accesses get the return type of the decorated method.
  • Types are inferred correctly from PEP-448 syntax in container literals.
  • Unsure types are handled in subscripts and tuple unpacking.
  • Uses are found for __call__() and __get/setitem__().

These improvements were accompanied by cleaning up dusty code, making future changes simpler as well.Furthermore, our style checker integration has been rewritten, making it much faster and easier to configure.

Perforce integration

Thanks to Morten Danielsen Volden we now have Perforce integration in kdevplatform.git, which can be used freely starting with KDevelop 5.1. Perforce is a commercial, proprietary revision control system. The Perforce integration in KDevelop simply works by running a local version of the p4 executable (needs to be installed independently of KDevelop) with appropriate parameters. This is similar to how KDevelop integrates with other VCS, such as Git & Bazaar.

Color scheme selection inside KDevelop

It is now possible to select the current color scheme from within KDevelop, a feature which has been requested several times in the past. This is especially useful for when KDevelop is run under a different desktop environment than KDE Plasma, where the color scheme settings may not be easily accessible.

Ongoing support for other platforms

We’re continuously improving the Windows version of KDevelop and we’re planning to release a first KDevelop version for OS X soon (yep, we’re repeating us here, please stay tuned!). For the Windows version, we upgraded the KF5 version to 5.32 and the LLVM/Clang version to 3.9.1.

 

KDevelop is completely free and available for download here.

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