Saturday, September 29, 2007

"I've got Barbies in my suitcase"

I took a break from Carbide 1.3 development to attend last week's CDT summit in Ottawa. I wasn't sure what to expect going in but after people presented their prospective contributions we ended up with an exciting list of new work planned for CDT 5.0 next summer. There are a series of improvements to existing features like the parser, code navigation tools, editor, project model etc., and some new things like a class browser and the integration of the device debug project's DSF framework.

We also talked about EFS support in CDT and Doug is going to explore using this to allow projects to include an arbitrary set of files from anywhere in the file system. Not sure if it will work yet but this is a big issue for Carbide users and anyone else doing C/C++ so I'm encouraged by any attempt to fix it.

I got to share a lot of the feedback we have received from Carbide users and demo our new Executables View. The debug support in CDT is in transition and we had a good series of discussions about how to proceed. I've been exploring moving Carbide's debugger to use DSF and it was great to be able to talk to Pawel Piech (DSF lead) and the team from Ericsson doing the gdb/mi reference implementation. Pawel endured some good natured harassment about the current look of the DSF launch icon which finally prompted his shocking but unverified confession about the contents of his luggage.

On the flight back to Austin I noticed a guy a couple rows up running Eclipse on his laptop (It stood out in the sea of solitaire games, powerpoint slides and action movies on the other screens). Turned out to be Chris Aniszczyk so I finally got to meet and chat with him during the layover in Chicago.

Again I was impressed by the professional, pragmatic, and friendly bunch of people in the CDT community. Thanks to Doug, the QNX team, and the Eclipse folks for hosting the summit.