Thursday, January 28, 2010

Carbide, CDT, EDC Update

Time for an update from our team here at Nokia working on Carbide 3.0, Eclipse CDT 7.0, and the new Eclipse Debugger for C/C++ (EDC):

EDC is now part of the regular CDT build. Many thanks to Doug Schaefer for getting this done. I hadn't done much with the CDT build before and wasn't making much progress, but Doug resolved a couple tricky issues, like pulling the TCF source in from Subversion. We still have a version of EDC in our CVS so the Carbide team can easily commit stuff, but I'm syncing it every few days.

Custom Variable Formatting in EDC: David committed the first phase of support for custom variable formatting. Using a new extension point a plug-in can alter the way data is shown in the Variables view during an EDC debug session. An extension can provide an alternative to the standard structure and content of any variable type.

We intend to provide formatters for some STL, Qt & Symbian data types. Also there are general purpose formatters for arrays and structs:





 
Unformatted C/C++ struct











Formatted C/C++ struct





Debug Snapshot Albums: A new feature in EDC is the ability to capture a snapshot of the state of your debug session for later review. A new Snapshot Album view shows the available albums of snapshots from prior debug sessions and lets you annotate their contents. Snapshot Albums can be launched to show a re-creation of the original debug session. Tim and I have been overhauling some of the initial work and getting the UI far enough along so that we can start usability testing soon. I'll write more about this when the work settles down a bit.

Plug & Play Debug Connectivity: We've made a lot of improvements in usability when starting a debug session on a phone. We started with a detailed analysis of all the options available when connecting to a phone, then narrowed them down into a new launch wizard that can start a debug session in just a few steps. This will make on-device debugging in Carbide a lot easier and I hope to apply some of the lessons learned when we overhaul the launch experience in CDT.

EDC Symbol Reader Overhaul: Ed & Steve are in the midst of an overhaul of the Dwarf reader in EDC. We originally wrote it for completeness and to have something to build the rest of the debugger around, but knew more work was required to get better performance and memory usage. This effort will likely be continuing for the next several weeks.

Community Contributions to EDC: People are starting to review the code, report bugs, and contribute patches. In particular John Cortell at Freescale has been improving the way EDC connects to TCF agents and providing a fresh perspective on everything from naming to API visibility.

That's it for now, I'm diving back into the code...