IDE needed to Hack on PHP (not with PHP)

A piece I’m writing for IBM developerWorks has turned into the article that ate Pittsburgh. Trying to understand and document a certain class keeps leading me deeper into PHP internals, and is revealing some bugs in a certain PHP extension bundled with PHP 5.1 and later. Naturally I want to fix these.

However it’s all C code, and I haven’t done any serious C work in 15 years. (I did write some C++ about eight years ago, but this is straight C, not C++.)

What IDE are folks using on the Mac (or alternately Linux) to hack PHP itself? Xcode? Eclipse with the C development tools installed? Something else? This is just a short quick open source patch project (I hope) so I’d prefer not to pay multiple hundreds of dollars; just use the simplest, quickest thing that will get the job done.

I could use a raw text editor and gcc; but I don’t really know the PHP code base, and so I’d like an editor that allows me to click on a function name or macro name and jump straight to its definition. For instance, I’m encountering things like macros named RETURN_TRUE inside void methods. What the heck is that doing?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 9:20 AM and is filed under C. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment, Digg this story, or trackback from your own site.