JetBrains has started sketching out what is coming for its CLion integrated development environment in the next big release, version 2025.2. The company has announced a preliminary roadmap, sharing the key areas its team is focusing on for the update expected sometime in July.
Based on user feedback and internal goals, JetBrains has decided to prioritize a few main things for CLion 2025.2. The big ticket items include boosting the CLion Nova language engine, adding new features for embedded development, and bringing support for JetBrains' smart coding agent, Junie.
The CLion Nova language engine is set to get a bunch of fixes and improvements. The goal here is to make it the standard engine for everyone using CLion. Planned enhancements include adding more of the "smart keys" that were available in the classic version, like jumping outside closing brackets or quotes and automatically reformatting a block when you type a closing curly brace. The JetBrains team is also working on making typing assistance faster for remote development setups, aiming for things like smart indentation or automatic pairing of parentheses and quotes to feel as quick as they do when working locally.
On the bug fixing front, JetBrains plans to sort out issues where CLion Nova might miss potential compilation errors during code analysis, meaning those errors only pop up later when you actually build the code. There are also plans to address problems with the code formatter, like incorrect indentation on a new line.
For developers focused on embedded systems, CLion 2025.2 has some specific updates planned. A major feature in the works is "Live Watches," which will let developers monitor variable values and memory in real time without having to pause the program. This is super useful for situations where you need a continuous connection, say when working with Bluetooth devices. There are also plans to add a new template for the ESP32 debug server, complementing the existing generic, SEGGER J-Link, and STM32 options. Support for FreeRTOS is also getting more flexible support. This includes better ways to display FreeRTOS tasks, the ability to view FreeRTOS objects within the debugger, and support for newer hardware architectures like Arm Cortex-M33.
Bringing support for JetBrains' AI coding agent, Junie, is another significant goal for the 2025.2 release. If you don't know, Junie is an artificial intelligence coding agent developed by JetBrains designed to automate coding tasks. It is an AI agent said to be capable of understanding a goal, creating a plan, and executing coding actions autonomously within the IDE, often working at a feature or project level rather than just on small code snippets. It can be guided by a special guidelines.md file in your project to follow your team's coding style and architectural preferences. According to JetBrains:
Junie is already available as a plugin for several JetBrains IDEs, but not yet for CLion. Adding Junie support for CLion comes with its own challenges. We’re excited about the prospect and are working to make this available in 2025.2. While we can’t fully confirm this timeline just yet, we want you to know that this is an active area of focus for us.
Finally, JetBrains is looking at improving the Project tool window's user interface. When working on projects that involve external sources like SD cards, especially common in Zephyr or ESP-IDF development, it can be tricky to tell internal and external files apart based on their path prefixes in the tool window. The plan is to make changes to the UI in 2025.2 to make distinguishing these sources much clearer.
In other JetBrains news, the company recently discontinued its dedicated test automation IDE, Aqua, consolidating its features into a plugin for more widely adopted IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm due to lower-than-expected adoption rates. It has also open-sourced Mellum, its specialized code completion language model.
0 Comments - Add comment