On IDEs and Build Processes: Changing to Visual Studio (Part 2)

Software is a field where one tiny mistake can cause magnitudes of pain and perhaps uncountable technical debt. People also tend to choose what they know, sometimes with less regard to better alternatives. All this is to say that I sure am glad I switched to Visual Studio for my C++ game after many weeks of struggling.

Back in the olden days of my first week of college a year ago, I used my first non-cloud IDE ever: Pycharm. I was encouraged by my introductory classes like many others to use the free student JetBrains IDEs (which is totally not to indoctrinate people into their ecosystem after graduation). Although I had used some VSCode after more experience, I was still mostly familiar with that limited selection of IDEs.

It’s no surprise, then, that I started my game in CLion. I’m a bit late on my monthly (?) blog postings, so I’ll get right to the point: Visual Studio is so much better for a large project. Did you know that VSCode = Visual Studio Code = Visual Studio Light? After being pointed in the right direction by my mentor/collaborator, I was amazed at the additional capabilities VS offered, which felt like a serious, production environment for the first time.

Solutions allow for much more flexibility and scope of builds. They’re like an entire build system, supporting multiple projects and environments. While many tools were available, debugging stood out—what might have taken me days or even weeks was reduced to just a few hours, thanks to seeing not only local variables but also memory usage and stack navigation.

I touched on this briefly in my first workshop (note to self: improve marketing and information organization), but the key to these kinds of breakthroughs is the initiative to learn and experiment, alongside having mentors to guide you. You might not be fully aware of all you’ve tried to get to your current workflow, and not everything will work out, but each attempt builds the broader context you work within.

I know it’s been a lot of structural programming content so far but the next ones should be more appealing to the mathematically inclined. Anyways, I am probably indocrinated just a little bit, as I use CLion for smaller projects… time to learn Vim I guess.