We were super thrilled to see you all at our Virtual Round Table event on March 17. What a turnout! We’re glad you all took the time to attend live – after all, it’s the COVID-19 era, and there’s an inflation of virtual events. But thanks to you, The Future of C++ Dev Environments was a raving success.
But before we answer all the important questions you asked during the webinar, let’s just do a quick recap for those who missed it:
We have gathered industry experts Nick Uhlenhuth (PM, Microsoft Visual Studio), Diego Rodriguez Losada Gonzales (Lead architect, JFrog), Brad Hart (CTO, Perforce), and myself to discuss where C++ dev environments will be in the next 5 years. I know, quite a challenging subject, but thanks to the 3 pros we hosted, the event truly lived up to its title.
We got to discuss all sorts of tools and trends (including the much-discussed shift-left trend), but instead of the general taste these trends usually have, we managed to focus on C++, which was awesome.
What can be better than discussing C++ with people who really know their C++?
Some of your questions were left unanswered… until now.
So, without further ado, let’s get started…
1. What is your opinion regarding Google C++ Testing Framework?
Our opinion is very positive. It is by far the most popular and well-established C++ testing framework. We highly recommend it and see it used by our top enterprise and non-enterprise customers.
2. What’s the future of the build tools compatible with C++20 modules, particularly support for distributed build tools?
The future will probably present diverse projects in which some will be using modules while others won’t. This hybrid state will probably dominate the next five years. Nevertheless, large projects—even those using modules to the fullest—will likely still require performance acceleration, whether by distribution or other means.
All this without mentioning the shift-left trend, which will add additional executions on the developer (unit tests, linting, security tests, etc.)
3. VCPkg… how production-ready is it? It seems like it was still prototype-y. We have several external non-public dependencies from vendors that we are creating NuGet packages for. VCPkg appears to be the “new way” to do NuGet native. Is that true?
In the latest C++ foundation survey from 2020, 15% of respondents reported working with VCPkg – it is fully production-ready!
4. Is the Incredibuild Hybrid Cloud aspect tied to particular cloud providers? I’m really curious if we could end up doing some of the hybrid stuff using our own Cloud provider.
Yes, you can scale to any cloud provider using Incredibuild.
In AWS and Azure, Incredibuild currently offers more features around auto-scaling and cost reduction, but scaling with Incredibuild to the public cloud can be achieved with any cloud vendor.
5. One thing that comes to my mind regarding local development environments (apart from building time, etc.) is quality-of-life tooling integration. By that, I mean things like code indexing and completion (e.g., via LSP). I know that most of the time, such things are integrated into IDEs, but there are also many ‘IDE-independent’ solutions (LSP plugins for editors like Vim or Emacs). And the question is: do you think that such tools will keep up with the shift to the cloud?
Shifting products to the cloud requires a lot of effort and a solid commercial back. We believe that only products with a strong and successful business case and a reliable commercial company to support and develop them will be able to make the cloud transformation.
6. What are the plans regarding QNX compiler support (qcc)?
If you are building with a QNX floating license, Incredibuild can highly accelerate your build times ?.
That’s it for questions asked by you guys.
However, if you’d like to ask some more, you’re welcome to send it our way at [email protected]
If you’d like to be reminded of other questions answered at the event, you can watch it on–demand here.
Stay Tuned for Our Next Event…
We’re gearing up toward our next event about cloud adoption in the gaming industry. We’ll be sure to let you in on all details soon. Stay tuned…
