OTTAWA, August 22, 2005 — The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to implementation of a universal development platform, today announced the next generation of the widely adopted Eclipse CDT platform, a platform for building C/C++ development tools. Developed under the leadership of QNX Software, CDT 3.0 delivers improved scalability, performance, and extensibility to developers targeting embedded systems and Linux environments. CDT has been adopted as the C/C++ tools platform for major embedded and Linux vendors, including IBM, Intel, MontaVista, Novell SUSE, PalmSource, QNX, Tensilica, Texas Instruments, and Timesys.

“The scalability, performance, and extensibility of CDT 3.0 are cornerstone achievements for the Eclipse community,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Having a powerful platform for building C/C++ tools that is widely used and adopted is an important component of Eclipse’s strategy for providing a universal development platform for tools integration.”

“The new features of CDT 3.0 create an enhanced platform for C/C++ development,” said Sebastien Marineau, director, OS Development Group, QNX Software Systems, and the CDT project leader. “Now, CDT 3.0 brings open source software development to a new level of integration and provides a robust, full-featured, commercial-quality platform for the development of highly integrated tools.”

The CDT Project provides a functional and extensible C and C++ integrated development environment (IDE) for the Eclipse platform. The new CDT 3.0 features include:

• Faster Parsing––The C/C++ parser has improved performance and speed, resulting in faster and more accurate searches.
• DOM Based Language Backend––The upgrade includes a more powerful language model in the form of a DOM (document object model), making everything from the C/C++ outliner to searching and refactoring more accessible to plug-in developers.
• Indexer Selection––Source indexers are now pluggable components, allowing users to select from no indexing, CTags utility-based indexing, and CDT parser-based indexing.
• Enhanced Managed Build System Configuration––CDT 3.0 improves the experience and workflow for developers and integrators. It offers full control over the output artifact and extension, pre- and post-build command execution, and per-project and configuration environment variable settings.
• Build Environment Control––CDT 3.0 allows developers to fully configure environmental variables when launching external build commands. The settings are configurable through the standard make and managed build C/C++ project properties, or can be set when creating new projects from the new C/C++ project wizard.
• Increased Support for Tool Integrators––The CDT 3.0 managed build system delivers better support for those who extend CDT, including ISVs and OEMS.

Widespread Industry Support

“The improvements in this version of CDT coupled with Intel C++ compilers help customers gain greater control and improve the ease of use of their development environments,” said James Reinders, director of marketing for Intel’s Software Products Division.

“The ability for system designers to develop in an array of languages is critical for MontaVista’s vision to innovate across a wide range of embedded and mobile devices and communications infrastructure,” said Peder Ulander, vice president of marketing, MontaVista Software “The evolution of CDT and the Eclipse framework for embedded development continues to enable us to deliver robust development environments for MontaVista Linux.”

“The CDT is an important step forward for our developer tools strategy on SUSE Linux,” said Karl Bunnell, senior software engineer at Novell. “A key reason Novell embraced Eclipse was to provide a production-ready, feature-rich Java development environment on SUSE Linux. Now the CDT brings the same rich development environment to C and C++ developers. Novell is excited about including the CDT, along with Eclipse, with its developer tools suite on SUSE Linux and the opportunity this presents to further drive the ubiquity of application development on the Linux platform.”

“Texas Instruments is pleased with the upgrade in functionality built into CDT 3.0. This new release contains a number of significant improvements that will benefit Code Composer Essentials, our Eclipse-based IDE for TI’s MSP430 platform of ultra-low-power MCUs. Combined with the benefits of the Eclipse open source platform, CDT 3.0 is a sign of the strength that so many companies play a vital role in the continued development of the project,” according to Juan Alvarez, MSP430 world wide marketing manager, TI.

“Eclipse and Eclipse CDT provide a rapidly evolving open source platform that sets interoperability standards and nurtures a commercial tools ecosystem,” said Manas Saksena, chief technology officer at TimeSys. “As an early adopter of Eclipse CDT in the embedded Linux domain, TimeSys has seen tremendous progress in the capabilities and maturity of Eclipse CDT as a framework for C/C++ application development and debugging. We’re looking forward to leveraging CDT 3.0, and enhancing it for use as a cross-platform development solution for resource-constrained embedded targets.”

Source: Wired News