Few software developments tools that I used in university over ten years ago stayed in my “toolbox” after all those years. Often it’s simply because they’re not applicable anymore to the kind of code that I’m currently writing. Suddenly, Doxygen came back into my “work”toolbox" this week, and I was surprised at how better it became over time.
I had to document a bunch of C# objects, so I looked to see what was the C# equivalent to the powerful JavaDoc (because, of course, C# is just a massive “me too” of Java made by Microsoft). Well, it seems that C# standardized around NDoc since it is natively supported in Visual Studio. Frankly, it pales compared to JavaDoc, and its syntax sucks.
So I looked back at Doxygen, and it was just as amazing as I remembered it. The Windows build of Doxygen even comes with a quite nice graphical tool to generate and run new Doxyfiles. The multi-page RTF document looked amazing, and I remembered how much I liked being able to create free-form pages of documentation (not tied to any specific class or function) using pretty much the same syntax. Doxygen now supports Markdown and far more programming languages than just C and C++. Doxygen almost made writing documentation fun.
Published on October 26, 2012 at 21:52 EDT
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