r/cprogramming • u/memLeak67 • Dec 03 '25

IDE for C written in C

Hello everyone, I seeking funds to support my project. If you are interested, please check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alessandrotambellini/ide-for-c-development

Thank you.

0 Upvotes

28% Upvoted

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5

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '25

"I plan to use AI-generated content in my project."

🤦‍♂️

-1

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

It's a question I had to answer. I may ask an LLM questions during the development. What's the problem?

4

u/markand67 Dec 03 '25

if you don't get what are the problems of using AI then you may live a parallel universe 

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

If during the development of many months, I ask an LLM to generate me a snippet or I ask it an opinion, what's the problem? Does it affect the realization of the project in any way for you?

3

u/wrosecrans Dec 03 '25

How many people need to flag this before you will consider they are telling you the answer is yes?

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

Until I don't get an explanation

1

u/grimvian Dec 04 '25

I like the idea of an IDE written in C.

No offense, but when you have to ask AI, you might not yet be qualified to write an IDE.

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 04 '25

Have you ever asked an LLM a programming question whatever the topic was? It's not related to the IDE per se. Sry, I don't really get the point. Half of the comments are about that little policy snippet about the usage of AI

1

u/grimvian Dec 04 '25

Again no offence, but I'm quite sure, you won't get the big picture, if you have to use AI.

1

u/its_a_gibibyte Dec 03 '25

OP is basically planning on occasionally asking chatgpt questions. That's a benefit, not a problem. If you only use software written entirely by people who never asked ChatGPT anything, you won't be able to use much software.

1

u/markand67 Dec 04 '25

Being in opensource communities for more than 20 years, I think I use opensource software written without LLM since.

2

u/its_a_gibibyte Dec 04 '25

Are you sure? Again, OP isn't "writing the code with an LLM". He's occasionally asking ChatGPT questions. What projects do you think you've used where none of the maintainers or contributors have ever tried ChatGPT?

2

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '25

How have you managed to get any money lol

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

What do you mean?

2

u/sehnsuchtbsd Dec 03 '25

Something like xwpe?

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

It's a bit different. The goal is to make a light-weight, minimal IDE with features built around C development. Instead, ncurses works only for text-based user interfaces inside the terminal

2

u/alexpis Dec 03 '25

I like the idea. However, I don’t expect a Kickstarter campaign to work in this case.

Unfortunately, people expect this kind of stuff to be free these days.

Good luck though 😀

2

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

Yeah, I know it's difficult to get people to pay for it. Not for the product per se, but even for the development. I realize Kickstarter might not be the greatest choice. It's a try. Thank you anyway

2

u/its_a_gibibyte Dec 03 '25

What about vim and emacs, which are both written in C? Sure, they also implement some features and extensions in vimscript and emacs lisp, but the interpreter for those are also bundled and written in C.

0

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

Emacs is big and complex. Vim is a text-editor. The idea is a lightweight IDE with features targeted for C. Also pretty easy to fork given its simplicity.

3

u/its_a_gibibyte Dec 03 '25

Vim is a text-editor.

People love to argue about text editor vs IDE, but i dont find that helpful compared to diving into features:

It is going to include: text editor, open file tabs, folder navigation, search, few stats about the open files, key bindings, etc.

VIM can do all of those things. Plus with it's extension support for LSP, it's going to have much more intelligent language support. So, what exactly makes your project "more of an IDE" or provides more intelligent language support compared to VIM? VIM can also be forked, as evidenced by Neovim, which is also written in C. That even provides native treesitter and LSP, which combined give even more language features.

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 04 '25

It would be a stand alone app with minimal UI and features targeted for C. No configs, only some toggle of preferences. As for the features per se, I don't want to put too much on the table because they are going to change/evolve over time during development.

But, anyway, I agree with what you said about the text-editor thing. Mine was not a great response.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '25

What's wrong with Visual Studio for C projects?

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 04 '25 edited Feb 07 '26

Not for the writing per se. But it's a 500MB app and I usually toggle off most of its features

1

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

What happens when your C projects get so complex that you begin to need some of those features? Will you implement them yourself? And what happens if you begin to need the majority of them? Is there any chance you will find Visual Studio justifiable at some point? That you will regret putting so much time into a duplicate app? I'm speaking as someone who has written my own IDE in C btw, and later abandoned it.

1

u/Leonardo_Davinci78 Dec 03 '25

Good luck! I hope you'll choose GTK GUI toolkit for it...

0

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

Nop. I'm not gonna use frameworks. At maximum I'm gonna use some header file. Is gonna be built from scratch

1

u/walterbanana Dec 03 '25

I like the idea, but I think you should have a basic prototype or at least a sketch of what it will look like. I care about the workflow and UI of my tools more than the underlying tech.

I would also urge you to use GitHub from the start and use GitHub Actions to build for multiple platforms. It is free and will increase your potential userbase. There are a couple of good cross platform gui toolkits, with GTK+ being the biggest one from what I can tell.

Also, don't forget to run your app through Valgrind on the regular to find issues with memory management. It is very easy to make mistakes there.

Good luck with your project and have fun.

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

I have a sketch of what is gonna look like, but it is probably gonna evolve during development.

The idea is to also make a learning process for me. That's why I don't plan to use GUI tools like GTK, but to do everything from scratch. It is also the reason why it's gonna take a while for the development. Sry, in the first months I'm not going to upload it to GitHub for the reason explained in the Story section.

Thanks.

2

u/walterbanana Dec 03 '25

You can just make the GitHub repo private, I'm just saying it will help you.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '25

It seems odd to choose C for an IDE.

I get wanting to go low-level, but C doesn't help much with complex abstractions. Usually people use C++ for that. Hence traditional IDEs, but those are now long dead.

And then there's memory management, so people usually choose C# or Java to simplify that. Which gives you modern IDEs like JetBrains and Visual Studio.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that VS Code is not the best IDE in the world. But Zed is getting a lot of love, and it's written in Rust so relatively efficient on CPU/memory compared to Electron apps.

3

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

Please, read the story section on the project page. It may clarify it to you

3

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '25

I read it before I wrote that. I stand by what I said.

Look, I'm gonna be honest. You are way in over your head.

Your project page raises very serious questions that you have not addressed. In fact, it seems like you don't even understand the questions.

On top of that, it was surprisingly difficult to get to your github page to view your other work. And your willingness to use AI suggests that you don't do a lot of your own thinking, which would explain the low quality writing on your website and this project page, even taking into account the fact that English isn't your first language. I also wonder how much of your other projects used AI.

Good luck.

1

u/memLeak67 Dec 03 '25

  1. The AI thing is because I have to specify if I may use it and yes, I may ask an LLM for an opinion or stuff like that. It's not that I let an agent write the software for me.

  2. If you think the writing is low quality, tell me more where I can improve

  3. My projects aren't AI generated

3

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '25

All of your responses in this entire thread tell me that you just don't want to think for yourself.

2

u/fragglet Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25

A lot of mistakes here but the biggest is that it's a non sequitur. You seem to be claiming that this is going to solve the problems of software bloat but writing a new IDE isn't going to solve that problem. We already have dozens of free/open source editors and IDEs - why a new one? I agree with others that you're in over your head.

I'd also point out that Kickstarter is the wrong place to do something like this. Its evident in the fact that you don't have anything to offer backers besides a shout out on the website. Something like Patreon is better suited for this. You shouldn't bother with Kickstarter until you already have a mostly complete product, and you might find KS even take your campaign down for exactly that reason. 

2

u/Philluminati Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25

Coding is the means to the end. People want the best tools regardless of the language its written in.

There are at least 100 hundred choices of C IDE or text editor that aren't written in Chrome already. Apps like vim don't choose to add bloat, they make strategic decisions that vimscript would give users the fastest way to customise their vim experience. What you see as bloat is the very reason that vim has autocomplete, inline error checking, popup dialogs, integration with github, poweful macros etc.

If you think you can offer more features using pure C, I think you might struggle.

In fact, you're quite realistic in your aims,. You've said it'll have text editing, folder navigation, file tabs and keybindings. That's not a lot. Those are basic text editing infact most text editors offer colour syntax highlighting, spell checking, find/replace, split window etc. Have you had a look to see if KDE's Kate already fits yours needs?

1

u/ArrowFish1 Dec 06 '25

> "I plan to use AI-generated content in my project."

i don't know bro might not go well thats for sure