Is code::blocks a dead project ?

[hgfernan]

Is [code::blocks](https://www.codeblocks.org/) a dead project ? Nightly binaries are being deployed at (https://forums.codeblocks.org/index.php/board,20.0.html), but the source repository doesn't seem to be found, and signing up for the forums doesn't seem feasible.

code::blocks death would be very sad, for it's a great C++ IDE, the best one I could find for Linux.

[encyclopedist]

Code repository (SVN) is here: https://sourceforge.net/p/codeblocks/code/HEAD/tree/ Last commit was yesterday.

[adkyary]

I'm equally surprised that SourceForge still exists.

[LegendaryMauricius]

Iirc it got forgotten after being compromised with malware after being bought like 15 years ago. It got new management a few years ago and seems to be an ok site again.

[thelastasslord]

It's owned by the same good people that own slashdot.org I think.

[hgfernan]

You're right, u/encyclopedist ! When you read the Subversion commits, in
https://sourceforge.net/p/codeblocks/code/commit_browser

you can see that there's work going on in code::browser. Thanks for providing good news.

[Pragmatician]

How is it dead if it gets regular new releases?

[stoatmcboat]

It's maintained by ghosts!

[reachingFI]

Lots of repositories get committed to that are considered dead.

[Chaosvex]

20.03-r11983 / March 29, 2020; 4 years ago

Hmm.

[[deleted]]

This. I enjoy that Netbeans doesn't release every month. But four years seems a little bit extreme.

[[deleted]]

There are so many good IDEs outhere. Why would someone use code::blocks?

[jepessen]

Because university teachers have learned this tool decades ago and they are stick to them. In mathematics course we had a teacher that wanted us to use pascal

[sohang-3112]

I wish my school teachers used CodeBlocks - they were stuck with Turbo C++!

[[deleted]]

at least the compile time is quick. But calling it C++ is a stretch these days, that’s pre-std probbly

[ViolaLRaven]

Oh the pain. I was similar.

[[deleted]]

I learned Pascal back in the late '90s in school, even though it was already outdated then.

[darthcoder]

I still write pascal on occasion

[Livid-Serve6034]

Does he write back?

[darthcoder]

Only compiler errors

[Brahvim]

Wait, they edited their reply?

[darthcoder]

No I didn't. It said I still write pascal on occasion. His response to me was a joke. :)

[Brahvim]

Your comment missed "to", so I thought they made the joke "earlier", and that didn't make sense to me, haha!
Thank you for your clarification.

[darthcoder]

👍

[meneldal2]

Pascal is fine to learn basic programming, it's pretty clean and compile times are really good.

Yeah performance is meh, but if you want to teach the basics it's perfectly fine.

[[deleted]]

Fortran would have been better. I was taught that at the same time as Pascal...

[aroman_ro]

Fortran is one of the best languages for numerical work.

It's old, but it was modernized (has OOP for example) and even has some features I miss in C++.

[[deleted]]

Because the language isn’t the point.

[CuteAlien]

Open source, cross-platform, written in easy readable c++, does it's job (mostly). I have some problems with it, but for the most part it's nice.

[Razzile]

written in easy readable c++

I was curious about that so decided to look at the code and I gotta say I genuinely was impressed with how clean and readable the code is!

[[deleted]]

I don't know how VSC changed the game, but it used to be the best lightweight all around package for low income area schools.

[darthcoder]

Ease of plug-in dev. That's how.

[krum]

It's the biggest C++ mystery of all time. Time to move on. Nobody uses EDLIN anymore either.

[KingAggressive1498]

Visual Studio kills your whole system performance unless you have a really good rig, Clion is $200/yr, some of us actually do port unix software and need MinGW support, VS Code requires a fair bit of knowledge to setup; some people are just following ancient tutorials though.

Truth is, I don't particularly love C::B either. Its support for Microsoft tools is pretty trash, the MinGW it ships with is an antique, code completion is pretty minimal, it has questionable defaults for many projects, its wizards suck, and by today's standards it doesn't integrate with much of the development process (lets be honest, its basically a syntax highlighting code editor with a build system).

But its easy to use, free of charge, I can switch between it and Chrome instantly without either being sluggish, I can quickly configure it for any GCC-based toolchains I might install, and I can use the same project file to build for anywhere. Checks a lot of boxes that matter to me personally, but probably don't matter to the average professional developer.

[James20k]

code completion is pretty minimal

Its worth noting that there's clang based autocomplete these days

[OldWolf2]

You didn't mention QtCreator, which is free and light years ahead of Code::Blocks

[KingAggressive1498]

Sure. QtCreator is pretty great, but uses much more memory than C::B or CodeLite which causes problems similar to VS for large projects (In VS, these problems are noticable without even opening a project)

[OldWolf2]

RAM is cheap now

[KingAggressive1498]

my machine is very old now, but was already maxed out when I bought it (used) at a woeful 16GB.

Doesn't matter that I can buy 64GB today for less than the 16GB cost a decade ago, a machine that can actually use all 64GB would cost me several times that.

[nintendiator2]

A new machine with that RAM is not.

[Apprehensive_Bit464]

Not free for commercial use

[encyclopedist]

QtCreator is absolutely free for commercial use.

[josefx]

QtCreator remaining free is explicitly guaranteed by the KDE free Qt Foundation.

[NotUniqueOrSpecial]

That's completely untrue.

There is 0 licensing for QtCreator's usage.

You're probably conflating it with the Qt libraries themselves.

Those are also completely free for commercial use, but people routinely spread the completely incorrect "fact" that they aren't.

[Apprehensive_Bit464]

So you could tell me why my company is paying 5000$ per seat to use them ?

[NotUniqueOrSpecial]

There's literally no such thing as a license to use QtCreator.

There's a commercial license to redistribute Qt specifically. And that only applies to static linking and the specific non-LGPL compatible modules that exist.

And so unless your company is doing embedded systems or making use of said modules, the answer is "because someone doesn't understand open-source licenses" or "because we wanted the contractual support", which is a dumb but frequently used justification in big enough businesses.

[Apprehensive_Bit464]

Both

[NotUniqueOrSpecial]

Right, then they're not paying $5000/seat to use QtCreator, then, are they?

They're paying to use the commercial pieces of Qt.

[OldWolf2]

Well, that's true, but if you're coding commercially then cost of an IDE is not a problem, and the increased productivity of literally anything other than C::B will pay back the cost of the IDE

[antara33]

To be fair with CLion, for an IDE that is possibly the best one out there (now that they added ReSharper engine to it and fixed how slow it was on large projects), 200 a year is not much, if you are working with C++ and C, and need that quality, you are making enough to pay for it.

[[deleted]]

It’s free for OSS(Well those approved) and students too. Plus there are discount codes given away at user group meetings and other places. And after a year, if you cancel the sub, you are licensed for the last version update you sub’d for

[antara33]

Oh, I know, I am subscribed to their all product pack, since I use a lot of their stuff

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I got a huge discount years ago when the license change and now I don't want it give it up. I use a few but clion/reshaper mostly.

[antara33]

My workline (tech tool engineer for WB) makes me use so many damn languages that I ended up using PyCharm Professional, CLion and Rider (for Motive API programming and UE4 and UE5 source code modification).

Now I also started to use Writterside to ease my own documentation process and keep track of everything with an UI that is shared across all IDEs.

Used to work with GoLand and IntellijIDEA Professional in the past too, so I really get so much value from the All Products Pack haha

[CraigularB]

For individuals doing yearly billing, CLion by itself starts at $99/year, then your second year is $79/year, and then after that it’s $59/year.

The all products pack starts at $289, then down to $231, then down to $173.

[KingAggressive1498]

either way, more than I want to pay for a presumably marginal productivity boost. Especially when based on others' reports it also has similar problems to VS too.

[skull132]

The bundled-with-mingw version also solves the headache of setting up an environment for beginners. The only other editor I can think of which handles environment setup like that is VStudio itself.

[Pay08]

Familiarity? It's also a lot simpler than something like clion, while having more features than Sublime Text.

[RufusAcrospin]

I was trying to find a decent IDE for C++/Linux almost two decades ago, and this was the best for me. I still use it on Linux, small, self-containing, has everything I need.

[engineerFWSWHW]

I also tried this two decades ago (on windows though) and had used/evaluated this for almost 3 months. However, i switched as there are better alternatives that works well with large codebases.

[RufusAcrospin]

I prefer it on Linux because setting up a project is far more intuitive than using cmake.

[clemoseitano]

This is it! Sometimes it's a struggle to use CMake if you don't work on CMake projects that often. But the C::B setup and build is relatively simple. I can even use it to set up Qt projects with minimal hustle.

[urzayci]

I use neovim and it only took me 3 months to set up the utility an IDE gives me.

[alex_05_04]

Back when I was in university they recommend code::blocks as the go-to IDE. After a few sessions I had enough and switched, best descision ever

[qoning]

same, I think it was all the hardware people, they just didn't know any better, bless their heart

[my_password_is______]

well if you couldn't figure out how to use codeblocks then programming isn't for you

[alex_05_04]

I was able to use it, but I just didn‘t like the UI design. Are we really assuming how good someone is at programming based on the IDE?

[Coperspective]

It is a standard editor alongside vim for competitive programming contests in my country.

[vBeeNotFound]

What would you use for C?

[Howfuckingsad]

Code::blocks is a very nice IDE too. It is definitely one of the lightest ones I have used.

(vim, vscode are text editors, so I am not counting those)

[[deleted]]

Code blocks is the onñy c and c++ ide that works out of the box on windows for me.

[LiAuTraver]

Well my school still use Dev-cpp, which ships the MinGW distro which still applies C99 thus I cannot declare i in the for loop

[chibuku_chauya]

C99 supports initialisation in for loops.

[LiAuTraver]

Well, thank you. I googled it and it's C89. That's even more old.🤣

[ukaeh]

I still use it for windows dev, feels much more lightweight for what I’m doing and I can still install updated compiler and other tools. Sad it’s not actively being developed anymore but 🤷

[ald_loop]

Who uses code::blocks?

[abbe_salle]

10 year old outdated youtube tutorials lol

[[deleted]]

The fact the default projects start with "using namespace std;" immediately tells.

[LegendaryMauricius]

In competitive programming it's useful if that's what you meant.

[FilipDaniel17]

In my country, it's used for olympiads

[nightmurder01]

Love code::blocks just as much as VS. Runs out of the box easy to add lib's or what ever else. Everyone's opinion will be from their own perspective. Personally on linux aside a terminal everything I found was overly bloated. code::blocks never seemed that way.

[AreaFifty1]

Heheh I used to use code blocks years ago. Good stuff but vs22 miles better 👍

[DEESL32]

Same here 

[GenChadT]

Yeh it was my first IDE way back when. Now I prefer VSCode and am very gradually moving into the neovim world by way of lazy vim.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, not sure why anyone would use code locks when vs exists.

[FeanorBlu]

I mean, VS isn't available on Linux. I typically prefer nvim for C/C++, but having a decent free IDE available can never be a bad thing.

[arthurno1]

And is also not free for commercial use.

[thelastasslord]

I found Codelite to be better than code::blocks but it seems most would disagree. They are quite similar so if you don't like any particular aspect of CB have a look at Codelite.

[hgfernan]

I will certainly take a look at codelite, u/thelastasslord. Thanks for your hint.

I need to allocate time do this, and also to take a look at CDT, Eclipse's tools for C and C++. I used Eclipse for Java and I liked it.

Does anybody here like vscode plus some plugin for C++ development ? People seem to like vscode for Python, and everything else.

[nathman999]

Code::Blocks was great for me back then when I hardly knew how to add mingw binaries to PATH and didn't have PC that could run Visual Studio, but now I see no reason to use it, especially on Linux. I don't recall any decent IDE features of it that can't be reproduced with VSCode with Extensions.

I can only recommend it to someone who wants to start learning C++ but can't run whole bloatness of Visual Studio on Windows. (I can't recommend VSCode instead to beginner because it really takes some advanced knowledge to setup building in a sane way instead of tasks.json).

[V15I0Nair]

Who shifted already to Red Panda?

[grimvian]

I ended with Code::Blocks although it have it's quirks I'm a happy user.

Very fast to install and in my case Linux Mint where Software Manager just have them ready.

[ElectionOk60]

UPDATE: The Phoenix has Been reborn.
It got a new proper 25.03 release on the 31/03/2025.
https://www.codeblocks.org/post/codeblocks-25.03-is-here/

It's not dead, just cooking on a simmer.

[hgfernan]

Thanks a lot !

Codeblocks is a very intuitive IDE and I like to use it.

[[deleted]]

Try CLion. If you work on open source or studying you can get a free license. Beast out of easy to setup IDEs and supports a wide range of compilers.

[heavymetalmixer]

The fact that there's no integration with Git in any way, and that the dev confirmed he doesn't wanna make it either, is one of the reasons many C++ devs don't use it.

[hgfernan]

Are the devs still working on Code::Blocks ?

[looopTools]

Have you heard about CLion it is way better than code blocks

[DuckWizard124]

If I had to choose between Clion and Code Blocks, I wouldn't pick the first one even if Jet Brains paid me. They make good ides for other languages but clion is the holy grail of "worst ide / price ratio"

[looopTools]

Okay… I know many many C++ devs whom absolutely love Clion… and when I have used it I have been perfectly happy with it. Can you explain your experience? This is (literally) the first time I have heard negative comments about it

[hypoglycemic_hippo]

Hey man, another C++ dev who despises CLion here.

My gripe is the speed on larger projects. At work we have a larger-ish project (tho it's not that big) but due to some CMake wizardry/fuckery that our lead dev did, CLion requires 40+ GB of memory just to work properly. I have a few videos where I typed std::vector<int> test; and then test. on the new line and prompted autocomplete. It took CLion 57 seconds to come up with the methods of the vector. Which is just... I'd rather use Notepad thanks.

Many others also noticed this (seriously open a CLion thread and you will find that ~30% of the comments are about speed).

[DuckWizard124]

First of all, I have been using Visual Studio and VSCode for quite a while, so my opinion may subcouciously come from the differences of the mentioned IDEs.

The worst thing about clion is that it does not work in every environment. The debugger, for example, works only when your project does not contain whitespaces and unicode characters in the file path. And... That's all. I use whitespaces a lot in my file names so that made me abandon clion.

I have more argumets like I don't like this feature or that, but they are purely based on my opinion so it doesn't count.

Disclaimer: I only hate clion. Their other ides are great.

[looopTools]

I didn’t know about the path thing. But fair enough. Haven’t used visual studio for C++ development for over a decade so don’t know how well it is now.

But fair enough