[cdt-dev] CDT project news

[Sebastien Marineau <sebastien@xxxxxxx>]

Just thought I'd post this to the CDT mailing list as I'm not sure
everyone has seen the newsgroup

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Hi all,

as John Duimovitch announced a few weeks ago, QNX will be contributing 
some of its C/C++ plugin code, as well as development resources, to the 
CDT project. We are also taking over as project lead. I'm sure people 
have a lot of questions as to exactly what is going to happen, so let 
me give some general background on the direction and vision that we see 
the CDT taking, as well as some specifics on how we will move the CDT
forward.

First, I want again to thank the IBM team for their work on the CDT.
They have done a great job in providing a rich C/C++ toolset 
for Linux development, which forms a great foundation for us to 
build on.


As was mentioned, QNX is donating some of its C/C++ code to the CDT
project. QNX's Momentics toolset (the brand-name of our IDE) is 
focused on C/C++ development for QNX targets, and runs on Windows, 
Solaris and QNX Neutrino hosts. 
It is heavily inspired by the Eclipse Java tools (we try to follow the
same look and feel for consistency) and we've also tried to follow 
a similar architecture. I believe the QNX code is a nice complement 
to the existing CDT code. 

With the addition of QNX on the CDT project, and participation 
by some of the other Eclipse members (Rational, Redhat and others), 
the goals of the CDT are going to change quite a bit. 
We are going to put more emphasis on broad host platform support, on 
expanding the development scenarios, and in having the right
hooks to support a wide range of external compilers and tools. This will
be achieved by developing a highly extensible CDT, where base 
functionality can be easily extended or overridden by plugins that 
target specific environments. The ultimate goal is to have core CDT 
plugins that not only provide base C/C++
development, but also form the integration points for
a variety of free and commercial C/C++ tools, having these tools
interoperate without having to do specific tool-to-tool 
integration. When we discuss the architecture of the CDT, 
we'll highlight some of these scenarios.

Our approach will also be to maximize the amount of code and
functionality that can be shared with the Java tools. As 
languages, Java and C/C++ are very similar, and working on 
common pieces such as editors or class
browsers makes a lot of sense. The CDT project will also try to maintain
a "look and feel" for C/C++ tools that is very close to the JDT.

Some of QNX's code has already been moved into Eclipse's CVS repository
under the org.eclipse.cdt.core and org.eclipse.cdt.ui components. This
code represents our core C/C++ tooling, including the core 
model, builder, editor, C view and so on, and compiles and runs 
on Eclipse 2.0. Please see the cdt-core mailing list for 
discussions and more details. We will also
be contributing to the debugger, although the debugger components 
will require significant re-architecting to meet the new goals of the
CDT.

As hinted above when I mentioned the debugger, a lot of re-planning, 
architecture and API definition is going to happen over the next month,
as we assess how to move forward given the broadened goals of the 
CDT. If you wish to participate in this, feel free to join the 
discussion on the CDT mailing lists. Note that there will be 
some disruptions as we update the web pages, 
builds, move source around and so on. Please bear with us, or better
yet, give us a hand... it will be greatly appreciated.

To sum it up, I'm personally very excited at being part of this project,
and truly believe that we can develop a strong C/C++ foundation for
Eclipse that will eventually rival the Java tools. I also hope 
that you will all be able to participate in building this!

Regards,

Sebastien

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Sebastien Marineau
QNX Software Systems
sebastien@xxxxxxx