hey,
i wanted to use Eigen and downloaded the source. next i created a little project to try the functionality of eigen. bute the i noticed the Eigen breaks my Visual Studio Intellisense. I works until the first line, that has something to do with Eigen and after that line, intellisense is not working anymore.
are there any tipps?

thanks
poebler

ps: vs2008 team edition/windows xp

There is nothing at all we can do about this. Intellisense in the old MSVC versions is particularly problematic when it comes to code making heavy use to templates. There is really no cure.

The only thing which helps a bit is switching to a new VS version or give Visual Assist X a try.

- Hauke

thank you for your reply!
i'm trying Visual Assist at the moment, but i noticed, that there are problems two. e.g. if you declare a Eigen::MatrixXd a, and you want to set it to the identity matrix, it doesn't know the method in the intellisense... but i can deal with that

once again, thank you for your help!

Well, there are some principal limitations how much completions the IDE can provide when using templates, especially with static polymorphism and the curiously recurring template pattern, which Eigen makes extensive us of. For example, if you define a function using

Code: Select all

template<typename T>
void myFunc(const Eigen::MatrixBase<T> &mat)
{
....
}


how should the IDE know what 'T' will be and what methods it provides? This is actually where the planned 'concepts' for C++0x probably would have helped, but they didn't make it into the new standard because this stuff is just so darn complicated to get right...

Also, the types like MatrixXd are typedef'ed through some serious preprocessor trickery, which are hard to parse for IDEs, but this is not a principal problem like the above.