JetBrains has announced version 2016.1 of CLion, its cross-platform IDE that targets both Linux and OS X. The new version adds many improvements to C++ support, code generation, Python and Swift support, and better Git integration.
JetBrains 2016.1 was previously known as 1.5 but was renamed to comply with JetBrains new versioning scheme, whose main goal is to add more flexibility to versioning and allow JetBrains to switch away from its previous one major version per year model, as well as to unify release identification across products.
On the languages front, CLion 2016 adds support for C++11 variadic templates and better auto-import for symbols from the Standard Template Library. Python and Swift are, on the other hand, two new languages that have been added in version 2016.1. Python support is included out-of-the-box, while Swift support requires the installation of a plugin. InfoQ has already covered in more detail CLion plugin for Swift when it was made available with CLion 1.5 Early Access Program. Python support is equivalent to that in the PyCharm IDE Community Edition and includes code completion, formatting and navigation, refactoring, code analysis etc.
CLion 2016.1 also adds a couple of useful features to its code generation capabilities by providing a way to generate definition stubs for existing method declarations. This couples with the previously existing override action, used to generate stubs for virtual member functions, and implement, used to override pure virtual functions.
Other improvements brought by CLion 2016.1 include support for multiple Git working trees, the possibility of cleaning CMake cache without also cleaning IDE’s metadata, such as indexes and caches, and support for attaching the debugger to an already running process.
JetBrains offers a 30-day trial version and several subscription models to acquire CLion 2016.1.
