KDevelop 4, a new development platform

Speaker: Aleix Pol

Soon we will hopefully get a new KDevelop 4 and we would like to present it directly to the KDE developers and the community overall on the Akademy. Since our last version, lots of changes have happened, we think we are creating a useful tool for C++ developers and we want to present it to the KDE community so that we can all take advantage of that.

KDevelop has been redesigned from scratch and we even have some features that are unique among all the IDE solutions on the market. and we strongly think they can be very useful to the developer because of its integration to the whole core development stack to make the development even more acessible (language, vcs, buildtool, documentation, etc.) without repeating the earlier versions mistakes.

KDevelop has got a new language architecture that is capable to abstract many language features, and not only provide a very powerful code completion, but to get the IDE to understand the code the user is working on, and assist him in many ways. An important aim is to assist the user on the level of programming that makes it hard (Language semantics, inter-file relationships, etc.), which is especially helpful when exploring new code-bases, or when searching for errors.

Since the developer can't work with the language alone, KDevelop provides a full integration with different build tools like CMake (Including code-completion and semantics) or Custom Makefiles. That way the user is not only comfortable when developing using his language but by managing his project.

There are many other components that KDevelop integrates, like in VCS software, where we can work with many different VCS tools transparently from our solution making it easy to the developer to do some easy tasks. We can integrate as well many different documentation systems to make it easy to the developer to know about what he is developing on and of course we can integrate different debuggers to work with the whole environment in a user friendly way.

As a KDE project we would be proud to be able to present it to the rest of KDE developers on this summer's Akademy, we think they would take advantage of KDevelop and we want it to be embraced by the developers. For all these reasons, we are really looking forward to present it on the Akademy.