While with Oxygene for .NET you may feel at home with Visual Studio as an IDE providing all the great built-in designers and debugging features (ex: XAML … etc) in the case of Oxygene for Java/Android and the new “Nougat” for Mac/iOS you’ll be better targeting Eclipse so you can run the IDE on the host machine directly with no need of Windows VMs to run VS Shell into…
From my experience, developing allot in the Eclipse RCP/plugins arena I can confess that creating a new language feature in Eclipse and all the additional goodies to augment it (debugger, custom views… etc ) is not not something to fear about.
By targeting Eclipse as an Oxygene IDE you can benefit of all the ecosystem and additional plugins (ex: Android tools, JavaFX/Swing UI builders, test frameworks, Maven/Hudson/Jenkins integration, easy help integration … etc) in a true multi-platform environment… This will be the right pick even for Mac/iOS development and as a prof just look to how JetBrains AppCode that is a Java based IDE (built on IDEA platform) managed to target Objective-C language and at the same time to provide a great integration with XCode.
Aside of the great support for Java (JDT) and C++ (CDT) Eclipse is also well-known for supporting additional/dynamic languages over the DLTK Toolkit. There are some well known projects using DLTK for adding new languages support into Eclipse IDE as D, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, TCL, Perl … . With Eclipse Juno/3.8 release was added also Lua support over the great open source Koneki/LDT … You may want to take a look of the nice features of the integration into the Eclipse IDE here.
So, overall … I think that medium to long term, Eclipse will be the best fit as an Oxygene IDE.
NOTE for @marc: I also posted this entry on your blog as a comment, but seams that it is not approved (originally marked as spam due to the embedded links)
re Eclipse: we are looking into further IDE options for Oxygene, in the log run; Eclipse is one thing among others. But for right now, we are focusing on VS and Nougat. There’s only so many things we can do at once
I’m delighted to find out that even RemObjects is considering Eclipse as nice to have Oxygene IDE … So, according to http://wiki.oxygenelanguage.com/en/IDE … Eclipse support is coming in 2012
Update: Look like the wiki was changed (see the change here) and Eclipse mention was dropped … showing now that: Support for IDEs other than Visual Studio is under investigation and review for a future version.
@deksden
As also put elsewhere I consider Eclipse the best IDE to target by programming language authors (see the above mentioned links) since aside of being true x-plat it has a pluggable OSGi based architecture (I’m developing allot over it) that supports myriad of editors/languages, debuggers, tools … etc. It even supports C# and XAML (see Eclipse4SL) … so why not using something that is mature, x-plat, easily extensible and very well documented ?
In regard of iOS/OSX/XCode … what better argument you can have then looking into how this nice Java based tool = JetBrains AppCode integrate into the Apple style developer flow. And BTW, Eclipse runs quite smooth-less on Macs
@jaguard
I have no problems with Java-based tools!)
But support for Apple toolchain in Eclipse is not advanced, so they need more work to integrate all tools into Apple-targeted build process. IMHO, its ok to have VS-based polished solution instead 2-3 half-baked IDE integrations.
… showing now that: Support for IDEs other than Visual Studio is under investigation and review for a future version.