11/10/2006

Refactoring for C

SlickEdit is a commercial compiler source editor that many people speak highly about. I thought I will give it a spin and downloaded the trial version. Their web page describes "cool features", but for some reason refactoring is not listed. Anyway the product has capabilities for refactoring several languages, and few quick refactorings (based on tagging instead of parsing) even for C; extract method, rename, modify parameter list, and replace literal with constant. At least for simple code they all seem to work. SlickEdit is also available as Eclipse plugin. I only tested the own IDE version.

You can find out the reason why there are not so many refactoring tools for C from MS and doctorate thesis by Alejandro Garrido. They are available via this site.

1 comment:

Doug Schaefer said...

Tell me about it! We often get requests for refactoring in the Eclipse CDT, but, other than rename refactoring, it's a challenge we haven't been successful at, yet...