Good starting cross platform ide

Question

I'm hoping to write an open source IDE for a programming language I'm designing. I was wondering if anyone knew of any lightweight IDE's written in C++, that I could use as a starting place. Ideally I want to use something BSD licensed, however I'm willing to consider other licenses if it is required.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

EDIT: I want to develop a custom interface for each platform. For example, use Objective-C to create a Mac OS X specific interface for it.

Answer 1

I would recommend taking a look at Qt Creator; Because it is written on top of the Qt SDK you get a cross-platform version (almost) for free.

Answer 2

Shameless plug...

You may want to investigate Ecere, an under-appreciated, BSD-licensed SDK. It uses its own language called "eC", an object-oriented extension to C (sort of like C++) that compiles by generating C code.

Ecere is nice in that it's light-weight and easy to use, features markedly missing from other open source IDEs (if you disagree, please enlighten me). It's not nice in that it's buggy and lacking in many respects.

Whether or not the Ecere IDE is easy to re-purpose for your programming language or not, you'll have to see for yourself. It might be easy because Ecere is not humongous, and the Ecere maintainer (not me) will be more than happy to help you along. On the other hand, maybe writing an Eclipse plugin would be easier, though I can't vouch for it at all, as I don't use Eclipse.

The advantage of Ecere, for what you want to do, is that it's a lightweight IDE with good access to the C, and has exactly the license you're looking for. The disadvantage is that it's not a well-established platform with a lot of users.

Answer 3

Eclipse is the best way to go. However you might want to check

1. Code::Blocks or
2. KDevelop

Answer 4

I was pretty happy with Eclipse, except for perf.