KDevelop team interview

[Richard Dale]

Philippe FREMY wrote:

> - Who is working on kdevelop ?
> - How did you get started ?
> - How long ago ?
> -> everybody please present himself

I'm Richard Dale, a longtime Objective-C/NeXTSTEP developer before I got into 
Qt/KDE programming. I'll try and describe my view of the (complex) history of 
the project since late 1999..

I was trying to port Squeak Smalltalk to GNUstep in September 1999, and 
couldn't find a Linux text editor or IDE that supported Objective-C. KDevelop 
looked promising, but crashed when I tried to edit some Objective-C. So I 
fixed the crash by making parse Objective-C - not as hard as it sounds because 
it is actually a pretty simple language.

I carried on adding syntax highlighing and so, and was most suprised to find 
that after a week or so I had a perfectly usable Objective-C IDE. I built a 
patch and Sandy Meier put it on the KDevelop site. I gave up the Squeak work, 
when I found it was more fun to try and produce a complete KDE Objective-C 
programming environment with Qt/KDE language bindings. 

At that time (early 2000), the development plan for KDevelop was that version 
1.x would be targeted at C/C++ developers, and version 2.x would support 
multiple languages. So while I waited for KDevelop 2.x to be ready, I carried 
on doing Objective-C bindings, which took much more work than I expected. But 
by September 2000 I finally had the bindings problem cracked and started 
doing Java bindings too.

I waited a long time, until December 2000, before I could add Java and 
Objective-C support to the complex and flaky 2.x app. But it wasn't usable, 
and it was only when Bernd Gehrmann came up with the gideon rewrite in about 
April 2001, that I could port my parsers and manage to edit Java or 
Objective-C without the app crashing. Meanwhile, KDevelop 1.x had got so much 
developer attention and improvements that it was renamed KDevelop 2.x, and 
gideon was to become KDevelop 3.0.

The java support in gideon is especially interesting, in that it is the only 
C++ IDE that allows you to write KPart based plugins in Java.
 
Bernd had to strip out MDI support from gideon in order to get something 
stable, that developers could work on. But this was regarded as such an 
essential feature, that some KDevelop 2.x developers were very reluctant to 
switch to gideon. So work on the two IDEs has continued in parallel. Only 
recently have attempts be made to 'synergise' developments by 
allowing common KParts to be used by both IDEs.


-- Richard