EclipseCon Day 1

If you saw Ken Ryall's photo, here's from the other side of the room:

We had an overflow crowd for the CDT 4.0 demo. It's pretty cool how much interest we seem to get in what we're doing. The feedback was great and I think everyone was impressed with the work the team is doing. I'm totally excited about it and I hope that showed.

I also participated in Robert Day's panel on Eclipse in Embedded. Embedded continues to be one of the main growth areas with Eclipse and I think we concluded that we're just scratching the surface. We really need to raise the profile of Eclipse in this market. The engineers see the value of Eclipse as a platform for embedded tooling and it's unfortunate that isn't common knowledge. We have our work cut out for us, but it would be great to get a huge contingent of embedded tools developers interested in attending EclipseCon next year and to get a bigger voice in Embedded marketing events like ESC.

I'm also very tired. I don't think I'll stay in the bar until 2 a.m. this night...

Ouch my aiching head

I've got one of those "You better pace yourself, Doug" mornings. No worries, a couple of cups of coffee and I'll be good. But it was a good party last night as my colleagues and I from QNX celebrated our win in the best commercial developer tool category. It is quite an honour to be selected and, especially for the gang who have worked on Momentics since the beginning, long before I arrived on the scene, they should be proud of their achievements as one of the earliest third party to take Eclipse and make it a commercial success outside of Eclipse's traditional enterprise market.

Tutorial day went very good. I spent most of the day with these guys:

Chris Recoskie is on the right. He's Mr. CDT now at IBM. The three on the left are the main players in the Parallel Tools project. One of the coolest things about the CDT is how it is being used in some of the big iron supercomputing shops. We talked a lot about how the CDT can be used in an environment where you need to do your builds and debugging remotely in this environment. There's definitely some architectural challenges to overcome, but including HP who has similar needs, I am starting to thing remote development is reaching critical mass and we'll need to figure out how to organize the players.

I also went to the Remote System Explorer tutorial where I finally got the time to learn the gritty details of RSE straight from the guys who are working on it. I learned a lot in those two hours and actually we could of went even longer. And I think RSE has the potential to help the remote development people. We'll need to hook everyone up.

Well, I have a busy day of talks and the CDT 4.0 demo at 1:30. So I better get at it...

EclipseCon Day 0

Knock on wood, I still don't have horror stories from business travel. Today was another good day. We were delayed in Toronto for a couple hours due to a wind storm, but that just meant I missed the beers Sunday night. No biggy. I'm sure there will be plenty of that starting Monday.

On the flight from Ottawa to Toronto, I sat a couple of rows behind Joe Clark. Joe Who? (Canadians will get that one). He was a popular politician in Canada during the 80's and 90's. He's retired now and was traveling alone. He followed us through US customs so I guess he was traveling to the states to give a talk or something. Oh, by the way, he's a former prime minister of Canada and later the foreign minister. Only in Canada would we figure it isn't a big deal to let a former leader of our country travel around without security.

Then on the flight from Toronto to San Fran, we had an more important person on our flight, Mike Milinkovich himself. (Of course, Mike being Canadian would be the first to say he doesn't deserve such accolades). But he did get the royal treatment, much more than poor Joe Clark did our our little regional jet to Toronto. Mike got through the airport quickly and by the time we got to our car, he was long gone.

Anyway, I'm happy to be here and it's going to be a fun week. I already met some CDT people who were sitting in the bar when we got into the hotel. I hope a lot of the CDT community is here so I can meet them all and find out how they're doing. If you are here, feel free to stop me and say hi!

Oh, yeah, and it's a phone...

As part of my planning for next week, I recorded all the sessions I am thinking of attending in my Outlook calendar. Well, that's fine, but my laptop won't always be available during the week, especially given the rumoured power shortage down there.

Recently I switched mobile phone providers. I did this mainly because in my recent visits to Europe, I really missed having a phone. Luckily one of the major providers here in Canada has switched to GSM, so now I have a phone that should work over there, too.

I picked up one of the latest phones. I won't say brand names, but let's say CDT committer Ken Ryall would be proud ;). I wasn't really looking at features, I just wanted a phone that was really inexpensive, but not cheap, on a three year contract, and this was on the top of the list on my provider's web site.

The more I get into this thing, the less I am thinking of it as a phone. First of all, I learned that I qualified for a free 1 GB MicroSD stick (which unfortunately hasn't arrived yet for my EclipseCon trip). What would I use that for? Well, this thing is also an MP3 player. So that's kind of cool, I've been wanting one recently but didn't want to fork out $100+ for one (yes, call me cheap). And from my last blog entry, you can see it has the now standard camera feature, which I will probably use a lot next week. Playing with it, I see it is also a video camera too (now I see why I need a 1 GB stick). And of course, it does all the latest games, apps, what have you that run on mobile devices these days.

Now back to my original problem of accessing my calendar during EclipseCon, I was playing with the PC software that does various things with the phone over my laptop's Bluetooth connection, and I noticed a Synchronize app. I fired it up, and found out I can synchronize my Outlook calendar to my phone. (It just beeped with a reminder for a meeting I have in 5 minutes, I'd better wrap this up). So this thing is a PIM, too.

I'm not sure if I'll be come a mobile phone power user. I still hate that the screen is so tiny. But I have the chance now to give it a try, I guess...

Way ready for EclipseCon

I'm sitting here planning my schedule for EclipseCon next week and looked up to see a wicked winter storm a-happening. California here I come...

Getting ready for EclipseCon

Well, I just got my "EclipseCon" haircut and I'm starting my final preparations for next week's EclipseCon. If you've never been to one, these things are more than just a conference where people go to hook up with the Eclipse crowd, it's a celebration of everything we work hard for over the year. It's a lot of work to prepare for but it's always a week to remember.

This year, with the help of the growth of the CDT community, we've managed to get a higher profile in the program with a C/C++ Development track. Here's what you can expect to see next week.

Monday
Short Tutorial, Extending CDT To Support Your Compiler (Chris Recoskie, IBM). Learn how to make your own Managed Build integration.

Tuesday
Short Talk, CDT 4.0: easy to use and integrate (Mikhail Voronin, Intel). Get up to date on the new project model changes coming in CDT 4.0.

Demo, What's New in CDT 4.0 (Doug Schaefer, QNX and Markus Schorn, Wind River). Demo of all the cool new features that are coming in CDT 4.0, or at least the ones we have working right now.

Short Talk, Intelligent Command Line Processing for the CDT, (Chris Mead, ARM). Shows an integration with the Apache CLI library for adding cool tool integration features.

Wednesday
Long Talk, Assembling your open C and C++ workbench (Phillipe Ombredanne and Francois Grenade, nexb/EasyEclipse). A great look at how to leverage a number of open source components to create a complete C/C++ IDE.

Long Talk, C/C++ Source Code Introspection using the CDT (Chris Recoskie and Beth Tibbits, IBM). Show how you too can take advantage of the CDT's parser and code models to do some cool analysis of your code.

Short Talk, Multi-platform development with the CDT (Graeme Johnson and Gabriel Castro, IBM). Show how they use the CDT to build IBM's J9 for over 50 different configurations.

BOF, CDT Project Meeting (everyone!). We'll have our regular monthly meeting during BOF time. Everyone is invited to see what's going on in the CDT project and to provide input for any issues we need to discuss.

Thursday
Short Talk, Autotools Demo (Jeff Johnston, Red Hat). Shows the autotools integration with the CDT.

Poster (up all week - Poster Reception Wednesday evening)
Extending CDT Debugger to Support Device Software Development (Mikhail Khodjaiants, ARM). Shows how ARM extends the CDT to support their gnu toolchain, gdb, and JTAG.

Hello C#

Not to get anyone excited, especially a particular executive director of a popular foundation, but I've managed to enter, build, and run my first C# program using the CDT.

I had previously did a language extension for C# that provides syntax coloring for the C# keywords and associated the CEditor with .cs files. In the last hour (while trying to watch a poorly played curling game on TV - yes, they broadcast curling games on the national sports cable channel in Canada), I took everything I learned from my exercise of getting my other build integrations working this week and thought I'd give a build integration for the Microsoft C# compiler a try. After a little tweaking to handle this special case where there is only one tool that takes all .cs files and produces a .exe, I hit the build button and an exe came out.

Luckily for us, Microsoft has reused their PE executable format for .Net apps, so the CDT immediately recognized the end .exe file as an executable file, so I created a launch config for it and hit the run button. "Hello World" it said in the Console view. Tres cool!

Now there's a lot of functionality that's not there. There's no debugger and there's no parser to fill the outline view and index. So there's a long way to go. But it was cool to see.

Wild Week in CDT-land

Wow, it's Friday. I'm glad. This week, once M5 was out the door, Intel committed their long awaited rework of the CDT build model. The idea is to make much of the good things we've done with the Managed Build System build model available to all CDT builders, and also available to the rest of the CDT that could really use this information. The parsers really need to know what compilers and settings are being used to parse properly. I can also see a use by the debug system to default to the best debugger given the currently active build configuration/toolchain.

As well, we get an upgrade to the New Project Wizard. I think the old approach of forcing users to select a language, C or C++, and then a build system, standard versus managed, was pretty intimidating to new users. How are new users supposed to know what a builder is anyway? With the new New Project Wizard, the selection of builder is hidden at least. It's starting to look more like my previous favorite IDE...

What made the week busy was that to do this, a lot of the underlying architecture of both build systems changed. Of course, with any major architectural change, a lot of things broke. Mikhail S from Intel is working hard on all the bugs that are getting raised, and I was able to figure out how to get my MinGW and Windows SDK build integrations working in the new way, so we're getting there. All the other committers are also measuring the impact of the change.

I think the biggest challenge is to get vendors who depend on these systems to take a look at the changes as soon as they can. Mikhail has been talking about these changes for a long time and has been publishing patches for everyone to look at for over a month. And it was still a surprise to many how vast the changes were.

While we do want grow the functionality and the architecture of the CDT, it is important that we don't make too much work for those who are integrating. All I can do is encourage them to get in early and get in their feedback to cdt-dev and bugs in bugzilla as early as possible. I'm sure there are surprises in store for them, and for us on how they are integrating with the CDT in weird yet intriguing ways...

Watch what you blog

This has happened a few times now. I blog something and it ends up somewhere like here. Definitely makes me want to be careful what I say. But at least they are helping to spread the word.

The Teraflop 'CUDA

It's interesting how the big vendors play off each other when some cool new idea gets close to becoming product. The latest one was Intel with their 80 core research chip for highly parallel teraflop computing. Now we see NVidia has released their CUDA SDK and C-like compiler that does the same with their latest 8800 series video cards.

Apparently, you can get 520 gigaflops (billion floating point operations per second) with their top end 8800 card which features as many as 128 single precision floating point cores. Combine two such cards in an SLI configuration and you can hit the teraflop mark, theoretically. They have a compiler that compiles programs written in C with some CUDA specific extensions that gets downloaded to the card which runs as a co-processor to your main processor.

I can see the applications for such technology being pretty much limited to scientific simulation type things, not general purpose computing, at least not in the short term. The main issue is that not every will have these specific cards in their systems, and it really is NVidia specific. But it looks like they'll provide a huge amount of horsepower at a decent cost.

One of the reasons I blog about these things, other than I think they're cool, is to show that C/C++ development is still alive and well and growing. I remember seeing a study a couple of years back that showed it on the decline with everyone moving to Java or .Net. But there will always be applications that need to run as close to the hardware as possible to run efficiently as possible, either because the computing resources are limited such as with mobile devices, or because they are very specialized such as the NVidia processors. Languages such as C and C++ that compile directly to executable object code is still the best way to achieve these efficiencies, and why we see the CDT as popular as it is.

CDT 4.0 M5 Now Available

I am pleased to announce the availability of the first "public" milestone of CDT 4.0, M5. CDT 4.0 is going to be a huge release for us and bugzilla is telling me that we already have 265 bugs/enhancements that have been addressed (more than we did in all of CDT 3.1.0 BTW). With all the new committers working on it, it is important that we get these milestones out to the community for feedback and testing.

So feel free to give it a try. Instructions and links are available by following the CDT website, http://www.eclipse.org/cdt. Note that you require Eclipse 3.3 M5 to run it.

Unfortunately, we don't have a New & Noteworthy. But things to look out for include new Views like the Include Browser, Call Hierarchy View, Type Hierarchy View, and improvement in performance for Open Declaration and Content Assist. The managed build internal builder works better by getting dependency info out of the index. There hasn't been much change with debug and the standard builder.

New Face

For those who follow the Planet, I have a face finally. Thanks to Ian Bull for putting it together for me. For those that don't follow Planet Eclipse, boy are you missing out!

Also, I am honoured to be named as a finalist for the Top Ambassador award in this year's Eclipse Community Awards. It's funny since I had a hard time deciding between the other two finalists when I voted, Alex for is great work on EclipseZone and Chris zx for constantly hooking me up with cool things happening in the greater Eclipse community. Good luck to both of them!

Old news is good news

I have to admit, I am one of the worst committers when it comes to responding to newsgroups. I have a tough time just keeping up with cdt-dev and bugzillas and writing code and ... that I never seem to have time to go to the CDT newsgroup to see what people are talking about. Don't vote for me in the Top Committer category, that's for sure.

But I went there today to announce CDT 3.1.2. I guess this is the first time I did since I got my new laptop a couple of months ago (see!) and it downloaded all the messages since the beginning of time. It was interesting. There are over 12000 messages since the first one where John Duimovich launched it on December 10, 2001. The talk then was on today's CDT's predecessor from IBM which was very different (and some lives on today in the Remote Systems Explorer from DSDP/TM).

The first message after John's was from 'dominic' who started a thread of fans that were drewling over the idea of a C/C++ tool in Eclipse. There were a few posts from people who had great feature ideas, like ant support and UML modeling (which funny enough is what got me into the CDT). People were concerned that the team wasn't testing using the funky new GTK support on Linux available in early access form with Eclipse 2.0. And, of course, people were asking, if you can do C/C++ how about supporting Cobol and Objective C too.

It's pretty good reading and gives a great historical background on the evolution of the CDT. And it's a bit spooky since I hadn't even heard of the CDT at the time and all this activity was happening. But the coolest thing is the diversity of people that posted then and post today. It certainly is a great way to keep in touch with the community outside the cdt-dev walls. And I'm probably the last committer to see the value in participating, which is now my late new year's resolution...

CDT 3.1.2 Now Available

It's been a pretty busy week as we are getting two releases together pretty much at the same time. The first is the release of our latest maintenance release CDT 3.1.2. Bugzilla tells me there were 101 bugs fixed in this release, which is a pretty good number given that we have been very busy working on CDT 4.0 at the same time.

The biggest fix that I put in was to move away from using memory mapped files for the Index (also known in some circles as the PDOM). Memory mapped files worked well until we started running into very large workspaces where we started to run into limits on Windows. I've switched it to regular files that read in chunks at a time and use a least recently used (LRU) cache to make sure we don't take up too much memory. It did cost us some in performance, but I'm still within the targets I had set out for CDT 3.1, i.e. indexing Firefox in under 20 minutes.

More information can be found on the CDT Website.

Stay tuned for our first real milestone for 4.0 early next week...

OpenKODE: Cross Platform Mobile Gaming in C

I blogged a while back about an open source mobile gaming device, the GP2X. It's a pretty simple and inexpensive unit with a dual core ARM configuration. I think a lot of people are using it for simple 2D games and there are ports of the arcade machine simulator, MAME, to it. It's not a very powerful machine, but I thought the idea was pretty powerful.

It got me thinking about whether the industry would be interested in a similar platform but with 3D gaming support. And if not, why not. Maybe these things cost too much to build. Maybe the business case isn't there. I haven't seen too much interest from the big gaming houses on porting their titles to OpenGL ES, a standard 3D API for mobile. But then, there isn't really a high volume platform out there that supports it to the scale of the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. Unless you count phones, but you can't do serious gaming on a 1" screen...

But it looks like the gang at Khonos.org are trying to do something about that. They recently ratified a draft specification for a common platform API called OpenKODE. It's a collection of C APIs, most of which they've already specified for video and audio. But it also has a OS abstraction layer so you can compile applications against any OS, or so goes the theory. The intent is to provide a platform for content providers that will allow them to hit as big a market as possible.

They are accepting comments from the industry and I see vendors starting to do press releases announcing support for it. My hope is that you'd start seeing mobile gaming platforms like you see with MP3 players, i.e., a lot of vendors making different types of devices but all supporting common standards. That would sure change the face of the industry a bit.

The CDT Can Help you See!

Well, not really, the NASA Vision Workbench can and this guy is using the CDT to work with it. After all the hard work we've put into the CDT, I'll take "Eclipse’s CDT plugin (which has definitely gotten alot better)" as a compliment.

What do you use for UI testing?

The TPTP gang were adjusting version info in an enhancement request I raised against their Automated GUI Recorder (AGR) and it reminded me I need to look into this issue again. I remember seeing a demo of the AGR back when I snuck into an Eclipse Architecture Council meeting a year or so ago. It looked pretty good and appeared to do what we've needed for the CDT since forever, i.e., something to automate testing the GUI.

The issue I have had with the AGR is that I want to integrate the test cases that AGR generates into our existing JUnit framework. Unfortunately, that was impossible, or more realistically, was a lot of work to do. And, also unfortunately, the word I hear through the grapevine is that the AGR really isn't staffed well enough to evolve it this significantly. It met the needs it was created for, i.e. test TPTP, and if it is to fulfill a larger role in Eclipse, it really needs more Eclipse developers contributing to it.

So if the need isn't there to trigger this investment, it got me wondering what people use to automate their GUI testing. Of course there are commercial products out there that do the trick and we've used those here at QNX. But for open source development, it would be nice if we had an even playing field so that anyone could contribute tests without having to purchase the "standard" tool, assuming we could even agree on which "standard" tool to use.

I heard of the Abbot GUI tester and the Costello GUI recorder, still the best names in open source IMHO, a number of years ago. While built for Swing/AWT, they started working on SWT support a long time ago but it has been slow going. I have heard of some people using it for their Eclipse testing, but I'd like to see an official release of it before committing to it. But it does what I want, though, i.e. integrate with normal JUnit.

So I'd like to hear people's opinions on this, especially on where they would like to see developers invest their time if they indeed wanted to contribute to an Eclipse open source GUI testing tool. I think the need is there, but that means "beans" if no one else does.

Now what am I supposed to do with 80 cores?

Yesterday, Intel announced a research project they've been working on to produce a core capable of reaching teraflop (a zillion floating point operations, or something...) performance. The chip they've come up with has 80 cores. Sounds like a lot, and it is. Now, this is a research chip and it is missing things like a memory controller which makes it impractical for anything. But it is serving it's purpose of helping us understand what such an environment of the future would be like. The benefits will be paradigm shifting, but we have a long way to go before we get there.

Of course, being a tools guy, I think the tools industry needs to jump on this. Without proper tools, developers just won't be able to deal with the complexity of the software that takes advantage of such scalability. This is one of the reasons I'm very interested in the Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) project at Eclipse. They are trying to deal with such environments today by providing tools that support developers working with supercomputers used for scientific research.

The challenges are enormous and include the whole edit/build/debug programming cycle. What libraries and programming language enhancements do you need to write an 80 thread or process application, how do you build and deploy such a thing, how do you debug it? I can still picture the problem of setting a breakpoint, having 10,000 threads hit that breakpoint and then trying to find the one that you are interested in. Sounds impossible. But there are some pretty smart people working on PTP and it'll be very interesting to see the solutions they come up with.

Open Source Translations?

Well, it was a busy week for conference calls. The latest was on an initiative to start an Eclipse project to take care of the translations for the Eclipse project. I went into it being mistaken that the initiative was simply trying to spread the translation work around for Europa so that IBM didn't have to do it all. It's a pretty expensive endeavour to translate all of Europa to 23 languages. But the intention is indeed to be more than that.

Now, for the CDT, translations haven't been a priority. We haven't released language packs for the CDT since the 2.x days. We still get a healthy 20% of our downloads to China and I haven't received feedback that they miss them. But I imagine we'd grow even more internationally if we had them.

Despite my original skepticism, I think a translations project is a great idea. Technically, making the translations isn't very complicated so you don't need to be a hard core developer to help with them. And, apparently there are some tools that have been made to help make it even easier. It would be cool for the users of Eclipse around the world to help out with this and would probably result in better quality as they actually use Eclipse.

My skepticism right now comes from the current focus on getting the Eclipse member companies to contribute rather than on building a community. I think if you focus too much on short term goals, like translating Europa, you won't solve much when the next release comes around. Hopefully, this project will find an inspired leader that break new ground in international community building. It certainly won't be an easy task. But it could be another great step forward for Eclipse.

CDT: An Open Culture

After today's CDT conference call, the gang here at QNX got to talking about how interesting these calls can be. Apparently, the CDT has something special going with how open we are.

The topic we were discussing was my mention of our plans with Momentics and CDT 3.1.2 and CDT 4.0. I did it just to let the community know that if I'm doing something weird, it's because I'm trying to get the CDT 3.1.2 into the next Momentics maintenance release and to set expectations on when we'd be trying to integrate our custom bits with CDT 4.0 to provide feedback on the new frameworks.

What I had forgotten was that in this highly competative industry, this is usually a no-no. Mentioning product plans could definitely cause a slap on the wrists. Product plans are high quality ammunition that the marketing teams use against each other. Not that I aspire to such tactics, mind you.

But with the CDT and even the DSDP, this hasn't really been a concern. We often drop hints on what we're doing commercially. It all comes back to "When is you problem my problem". If you at least know about my problem, you might make some effort to help me. But if I'm keeping my intentions secret, there is no trust, and I can't see how you can have any hope of co-operation from the community.

In the end, we concluded that the CDT was a pretty cool project to be a part of. There are a lot of projects at Eclipse now, and not all of them have realized the benefits that an open culture can bring them and their customers. And it's not just getting people to help you with your problems, either. It's just cool to be in touch with the rest of the industry and know what's going on out there.

Windows Vista versus OpenGL

I just finished reading Tom's Hardware's benchmarks comparing Vista and XP. I remember hearing that Microsoft was dropping OpenGL support and Tom's confirms it with their benchmark of OpenGL apps. I don't follow the graphics community as much as I'd like but this really has to be a blow for some of them. If not that, then it's a blow for them upgrading to Vista.

Back on my Digital Content Creation with Eclipse soap box, I guess this kind of spells doom for the OpenGL work that's been going on with Java and, by extension, SWT. I have always thought that it would be very cool to have a 3D modeler built on Eclipse and nicely integrated with the CDT to build games and such. Most of these modelers are built using OpenGL and probably don't work well on Vista.

So the question becomes, when will someone build DirectX support in Java in an SWT window?

It also provides a twist for the work I'm doing on Windows development. I've been torn between whether Windows developers should use the Windows SDK or MinGW with the CDT. I'm not sure how mature the DirectX support is with MinGW compared to their OpenGL support, so my feeling is that the Windows SDK with the DirectX SDK will be what developers will want to use. Which means I better get that Windows SDK integration done...

My Take on Eclipse PluginFest

Well, I'm finally home from my trip out to the Eclipse PluginFest. I made a side trip to Karlsbad, Germany to visit a customer, where it was pretty cool to see them adding their own plug-ins. Eclipse is indeed everywhere. And I was met by a very Canadian-like snow storm there. While it was fun to drive in, I missed out on a lot of sleep with the late arrival. But it was still warmer there than the -20C here.

Ian has a really nice summary of the PluginFest event so you can read that to get the general gist of what happened. From my seat, it went way beyond my expectations. I found everyone who attended to be very open and we all filled up our laptops with trial versions of each other's products and tried them all together. I was concerned that being a commercial event there would be a lot of protectionism happening. But it turned out that most of us already knew eachother from past Eclipse events, so were instantly comfortable with each other.

For the most part everything worked, but that is to be expected given the clean plug-in architecture of Eclipse. But it did point out an important requirement that everyone be on the latest version of the Eclipse plug-ins. Happily we made that decision at QNX last year and it paid off for everyone who did. It was cool to see other plug-ins work with our product and that should open the door for some pretty cool environments for our customers. And the sentiment was shared by the other vendors there as well.

But as Ian mentioned, the value of the event went well beyond testing our plug-ins. It was a great opportunity to talk to everyone who was there. I had a lot of people ask me CDT questions, including a couple asking how to get involved and contribute the CDT changes they have had to make for their products. I also got a chance to talk to a couple of the CDT committers that were there to go over design issues we need to resolve. Meeting face-to-face this way is pretty expensive, but it certainly has a lot of value for the people that get to go.

We definitely need to do this again, maybe after a year to give us all a chance to get onto the Europa platform. The gang at Symbian were great hosts, but I have a feeling a lot more vendors will be interested in this next time and we'll probably need a bigger venue. This was our first try at bringing vendors together for inter-operability testing and it really shows the value of the Eclipse architecture. And I'm sure all vendors building on Eclipse would be interested in this. I see big things in the future for the Eclipse PluginFest.

When is your problem my problem?

I just got off a conference call we hold semi regulary amongst the committers working on the CDT indexer. Now that we have people from four different organizations working on it, we need this level of co-ordination to ensure we don't trample on eachother. And it is a cool example of open source development at work.

Now when you get this many interests working on a common code base, you are likely to run into times when requirements start to conflict with each other, and you end up with conflict amongst the developers. This has started to happen with us and it is giving me an opportunity to really learn the right approach to take to make sure everyone walks away happy, or even whether it is possible for that to happen.

Taking a big step back, I think the first thing you have to do if you have a requirement you'd like the open source project to satisfy is to convince others in the community that it is their problem too. Now sometimes that isn't possible because the requirement really is particular to your customers. In that case, I think you need to convince the others that the changes you are proposing will have minimal impact on them and others who want to build on and use the project. There are times, especially with young projects, where people might bend over backwards to help you. But you certainly can't count on it, nor should you.

At the end of the day, what it really boils down to is that you have to convince people. Influencing is a critical skill that an open source developer must have to be successful working with open source. In a corporate environment, you have it easy since you can always go complain to management. But in open source, all the committers are peers, there are no managers, so they need to work out any conflicts with eachother. And that demands great people skills.

It is pretty interesting that our little indexing group has such great influencers and the discussions can become quite heated. But we do respect eachother and will continue to hammer out these issues and try to come up with the right solution for everyone.

And if this does work out for us, it'll make a great chapter for a book on working in open source. There may be a book out there already that I need to read, or maybe not and someone needs to write one. Because I see this happening on almost every open source project I see.

Eclipse is ... an Opportunity

Despite Doug Gaff's wish to have the last word on the Eclipse is You/Me/Who? issue, I do have one more thing to say on it (Sorry, Doug :). I was at the Device Debug meeting in Toronto last week, and for me it was deja-vu all over again. We had similar meetings on the CDT many times in the past, ones where a big number of people, 30-40 say, get together to talk about Eclipse projects, but in the end only 4 or 5 of them are actually planning on contributing anything to the project despite there being a need for many more.

Who are the rest? Well they are developers sent by their managers to make sure they keep tabs on what is going on. What it really tells me is that these companies don't really need anything from the project, not yet at least. But if something does come up that they can use, at least they know about it and can start making plans for it. But really, they are a long way off from having the compelling business reason that their managers need to allocate resources towards making any contributions back.

We've talked about the difficulty at making that leap from user to contributor. The biggest is just the expense of allocating developers to something that may not be their core competency. And, in fact, they may not have the Eclipse expertise on staff to actually do it. And it's really unfortunate, because without help, Eclipse projects have a hard time getting to the point where they would be useful enough to justify contribution. I feel Doug G's frustration at trying to start new projects in this environment.

So it got me wondering, looking at other examples in the industry, whether these companies would be willing to pool, not people, but money towards hiring shared developers. I know of a few small consulting companies that get paid to work on open source. I think this has the potential to solve some of the staffing problems that we're seeing on these projects. But I'm no expert on whether this is a good, or at least sustainable, business model. It would be interesting to see if people are willing to work together this way. And I encourage such consulting companies to ask around and see if they can make it work.

EasyEclipse for C and C++, half way there

In my previous entry, I yearned for a single install of Eclipse, CDT, MinGW, and some libraries to get you "Kickstart"ed using the CDT on Windows. As Chris, zx, quickly pointed out, EasyEclipse already has some of this done and hooked me up with Phillipe Ombrédanne from nexB who created EasyEclipse. Of course I already know Phillipe who led the Google Summer of Code project for Eclipse and who is scheduled to give a talk on the C/C++ Eclipse ecosystem (amonst many others I see) at this year's EclipseCon.

EasyEclipse for C and C++ is definitely a great start at what I wanted to acheive. And I see from the comments on the site, there are people already asking for MinGW to be included.

So I've altered may plan and will work with the gang at EasyEclipse to complete EasyEclipse as a full fledged IDE offering. They already have a thriving community so it will be cool to build on that and get more C/C++ users involved.

Time for a CDT Kickstart?

I subscribe to Google Alerts and get notifications whenever something new pops up mentioning the CDT. I've been seeing a lot of blog entries lately which is a cool sign that people are talking about the CDT and spreading the word. Unfortunately some of the comments deal with the difficulty of getting the CDT up and running, especially on Windows.

So I think it's about time to do something about it. One thing I've wanted to do for a while now is to create a Windows installer that bundles up everything you need to start building applications with the CDT. As a product manager I used to work with said, "How do you call it an IDE when you don't bundle a compiler with it?"

So my plan is to bundle the Eclipse Platform and the CDT run-times with the MinGW gcc build tools and gdb debugger. I will bundle in SDL, Simple Directmedia Layer, as a library to start building multimedia apps. I may look at bundling wxWidgets for building traditional GUI apps. I will also look at bundling a JRE so users can get Eclipse up and running with minimal effort, although I'm not sure if the Sun redistributable license will let me do this with an open source app and I'm not sure what other options I have.

Unfortunately a bunch of these components are GPL and LGPL so I won't be able to release it from Eclipse itself given the IP rules. I'll also need to figure out how GPL affects the package and it would be very disappointing if it prevents me from doing this. Sourceforge is probably the best place for this. I plan on using the Nullsoft Installer since it seems to have the most flexibility in any of the other free Windows installer technologies and is used by other open source projects such as MinGW itself.

So I'm interested in peoples' opinions on this, if this is the right set of components for example. Is it worth my time putting together? The idea is to keep it simple so it doesn't take me too much time to start and keep up to date. But I think it'll be a boost to help new users get a start with the CDT, a Kickstart if you will.

The D Programming Language

Well, if you are keeping score at home, you know that I hate Java even though I spend 95% of my coding time in Java, really like C# as Java done right, but not as much as I love C++ which though tough to learn does almost everything right, but can never forget C which is used by most of my QNX customers. And also not to forget Ada which has the best type safety system I've seen. But even with all these choices, I'm still searching for the ultimate programming language that maximizes quality and productivity when building complex systems.

So, of course, I had to check out the D programming language when I learned that it will be releasing in a 1.0 version "real soon now". From the dates on the spec, the idea has been around for a couple of years now. To sum up this new language, it essentially takes the best from C, C++, Java, C#, Python and Ruby in an attempt to make the uber systems programming language.

It is a valiant effort and does have my favorite language features such as garbage collection, delegates, strong typedefs, templates, overloading, etc. It also compiles to native code eliminating the need for a Virtual Machine, although given that it has garbage collection, it still needs an extensive runtime library. But with that and with a smooth integration with C and with Windows C libraries especially, it stays true to the systems programming paradigm.

But the language is huge, almost rivaling the size of Ada. I can see why it's taken quite a while to come up with a 1.0 quality compiler. And we really need to ask the question whether the world needs another systems programming language, especially when it doesn't really add anything new to the collective pool, other than collecting the pool.

I'll keep an eye on its progress as it starts to take on the world. At the end of the day, of course, it'll be the programmer community that decides whether D is so good that it is worth climbing the learning curve and adopting a new toolchain and maybe even a CDT integration.

Stream Computing

And now for something completely different...

Enough about I am Eclipse, Eclipse I am. I actually think Steve Northover really is Eclipse, or is it not Steve's Widget Toolkit? Or is it Crazy Doug's Tooling? Or something...

Anyway, the talk at Tom's Hardware today, or at least this guy's opinion piece, is on AMD's insistence that multi-core is dead, long live Accelerated Processing Units. Actually, it sounds like almost the same thing as multi-core just with fancier hardware as some of the cores. The Opteron architecture makes the array of possibilities interesting and feasible and it'll be cool to see what they come up with now that they've teamed up with my fellow Canadians at ATI.

One possibility I find intriguing is integrating Stream Processors into the concoction. From my Google searches I see stream processing has been around for a couple of years now and it has hit the streets as the technology behind the latest generation of graphics cards. Stream processing is essentially parallel processing units that perform like SIMD processors but on streams of data. In that sense it can handle larger volumes of data like a DSP but with multiple processing units.

So why is that interesting to me. Well, as I am always looking for the next great programming paradigm. When object-oriented first came along when I was in university, I was an early adopter because I could see the benefits it gave me when organizing my programs. I am always looking out for the next big improvement in programmer productivity and we've been stuck now for quite a while with objects and classes and methods and such.

I am positive the next big thing will be parallel programming. The hardware guys are making these great multi-core/multi-processing-thingy machines. The question is what is the right programming paradigm. Is stream processing it? Maybe. But I am thinking that the next big thing has to be multi-dimensional programming in some form or other. I still wonder back to Action Semantics from UML as a possibility, but this stream thing is interesting too...

Eclipse is You and Here's Why

There's been some interesting points on the Planet following the "Eclipse is You" post by Bjorn. It has always rubbed me the wrong way when people criticize the committers for not meeting their requirements. And it is not just with these posts, we get it sometimes on the cdt-dev list and bugzilla too. But as I mentioned in my last post, I do appreciate the feedback as it helps me understand what I need to do to grow the community.

But people keep forgetting one thing about the committers. They don't work for the Eclipse Foundation. They are not contractually obligated to do anything, really. I work for QNX Software Systems. They pay me to work on the CDT because it is a fundamental piece of our Momentics IDE. Any work I do beyond that is on my own initiative and if my time is needed elsewhere by my employer, I have to drop those things.

So when people say that the Foundation, or the Eclipse Board for that matter, should get the projects to do this or that, they can't. There is no mechanism in the governance model for Eclipse to make that happen. It just doesn't work that way.

That's why Eclipse is You. Because if you want something done in Eclipse and no one wants to, you have to do it. And, unfortunately, simply submitting patches doesn't work all the time. Because it requires committer time to apply and as I've mentioned, the committers are at the whim of their employers whether they have the time. Not only that, but you may have to persuade the committers that you are doing the right thing.

So we do the best we can and we try to go beyond the call of duty to make sure the community is happy. And most of the time, it works out. But sometimes it doesn't, and I understand the frustration. Remember though that Eclipse is a meritocracy. Submit a number of great patches and help the community out, i.e. go beyond the call of duty yourself, and a committer would be happy to nominate you in as one too.

It's all about You!

According to Bjorn, Eclipse is You. Being on the receiving end of many "CDT doesn't do , or CDT is too slow doing ", I couldn't agree more. Say those words and you earn instant membership in the CDT community. And I appreciate every one of them, I actually do. It means you care and have spent the time to contribute your guidance to our collective knowledge. And it's the first step down the path to contributing even more.

Now, Time Magazine has selected the Person of the Year, and it also happens to be You. Coincidence? I think not!

Migrating from Visual C++ to CDT

I've put the finishing touches on the CDT's managed build support for the Windows SDK. Well, at least there's enough there for people to try with our upcoming CDT 4.0 milestone (M4, but it's really our first for this release). It auto-detects where you've installed the compilers, header files, libraries, etc., by looking it up in the registry. I've also updated the error parsers to more accurately parse compile and link errors. It works pretty good and I'm using it to build the native code for the Windows debugger integration.

But, you know, I forgot about the standard builder. It's funny how you get tied up in solving the hard problems when the easy ones are there staring you in the face. I have to give a big thanks to three guys from IBM India who have written a tutorial on how to import Visual C++ projects into the CDT. The solution is elegant in its simplicity and really shows the flexibility of CDT's standard make projects.

All you need to do is get Visual Studio to generate the makefile for you. This is a feature that they've always had to support external builds (although in recent versions you can run Visual Studio headless to do builds as well). Then you create a CDT project at the root directory containing your source. Of course you'll have to change the make command to use nmake, Microsoft's own nasty version of make, but that's pretty easy to do and works well.

Combine that with this guy's perception that the CDT has certain features that Visual Studio users would like, and the discussions I've had with embedded developers using CDT but using Visual Studio for emulation on Windows, gives me a warm fuzzy that supporting the Windows SDK is the right thing for the CDT. There are Windows developers who are looking for a migration path to get into the Eclipse ecosystem.

Fun with OpenGL ES

I've got two young teenage boys and like a lot of other young teenage boys, they love video games. The computer geek in me, of course, made me wonder how the games were made. So I spent a fair amount of my hobby time a couple years ago learning a bit about the games industry and the technological challenges they face making games look great with limited resources. It was very interesting and if I was a few years (o.k., a lot of years) younger I would have considered a career change in that direction.

But I still poke my head into gaming technology once in a while, especially when I have an excuse to test the CDT on it. One thing that I ran across in my investigation into the needs of embedded developers is support for the OpenGL ES standard. This is a cut-down yet still pretty powerful version of the OpenGL standard that lies at the heart of video games like Doom 3 and the cool desktop effects you see with Mac OS X. The ES version is used on many embedded devices such as cell phones and PDAs.

PowerVR is a chunk of 3D graphics silicon IP that is included in some pretty cool System-on-a-Chip (SoC) parts, often paired with Arm processors. I think you'll see these chips popping up in many new and exciting places. But as this happens, they'll need content to drive their 3D power. And that means a lot of people are going to need to learn how to program to the ES standard.

Imagination Technologies where PowerVR originates came up with a great way to get more people programming for their chips, a Windows OpenGL ES emulation environment. With this environment, you can program an OpenGL ES application and run it on your Windows box instead of having to fork out a lot of money for boards that have the PowerVR core until you get serious about it.

This is great example of why more embedded developers that I run into are excited about the Windows compiler and debugger support in the CDT I am working to deliver for CDT 4.0. With this environment you get a professional quality environment for Windows to build and debug your application with the emulator and then use the same development environment to work with the code as you polish it up for the end device. I'm really looking forward to getting this capability into developers hands so they can build some cool games. For the kids, you know...

printf-free Debugging

When people ask me who the CDT's biggest competitor is, they often expect me to say things like VisualStudio or one of the many Linux IDEs (and no, Netbeans isn't quite there yet). But the truth is that the biggest competitor to the CDT remains good ol' vi and make (or emacs and make for the more advanced developer). We are certainly working hard to make the CDT an easier environment to adopt, but there are still the masses that can not afford the time to climb the learning curve.

But the 'vi and make' answer addresses edit and build. As I've mentioned here before, my favorite IDE feature remains visual debugging. For me, nothing beats that quick glance at the stack and then moving over to the variables view to see what all their values are. Measure that against the number of gdb commands you'd have to enter to do the same, you just can't beat it (did I also mention that I hate typing?).

But looking around the industry, I finally figured out who our main competitor on the debug side is, good ol' printf. Now in some environments where it's hard to set up a debugger and all you got is console output, you have no choice. But how do these guys live with the edit/build/debug cycle every time they want to see a different variable output? And we've all done it at some point in our careers and likely very recently too. We need to make sure we have the right tools to put a stop to this.

At the very least, for the embedded developer, you have JTAG to drive things at the lowest level. And with many of the JTAG devices now supporting the GDB remote protocol, you can use gdb to debug at these levels. The next step is to see the CDT better support GDB running in that configuration. And that's what I'm working on today (sorry Windows debugger, you'll have to wait a couple of weeks).

Tools have an immense opportunity to improve developer productivity. But in order for the developer to benefit from this, the tools need to be easy to learn and use. I think that'll be the next big challenge for the CDT, and one we'll need to address to be truly 'Uber'.

SystemC/qemu - Three Worlds Collide

Way back in February, I wrote about a really cool hardware description language called SystemC. It is essentially a C++ library that allows a programmer to model hardware concepts and included a run-time that simulates the hardware. This is one of the reasons I love C++, you can use templates and overloads and inlines to bring the abstraction layer up a few notches, essentially defining a new language, without having to build a new compiler. And it usually optimizes out to something very fast.

I've also been following the development of qemu, a processor emulator that runs on multiple targets and has extensibility to add emulation of peripherals as well. And, if you have a fast machine, you can almost get the same performance as the real hardware. The best thing I see about qemu is that it really lowers the barrier of entry for people who want to try out embedded development without having to spend real money on real hardware. And it is much easier to carry around to trade shows :).

Well, if you have two very cool simulation/emulation environments, wouldn't it make sense to combine them? Of course, and that's what a group from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona have done. They have implemented a bridge that appears on the qemu PCI bus for drivers to access and passes signals back and forth to the SystemC design. It's a great idea and really opens the door wider for hardware/software co-design.

Gotta Love The Wide Screen

I got a new laptop last week after mentioning to my boss that I need to see what those Intel guys are up to with the multi-core support they are adding to the CDT. They already have parallel build for the managed build's internal builder and were discussing parallizing the CDT indexers. (Not to mention I always like to have the latest gadgets, shhh). And my boss obliged.

I was a bit concerned with getting the new laptop since our new standard is for a 15" 1680x1050 wide screen. I don't have the best eyes in the world and the fonts looked pretty small on it. But, hey, it would be cool for watching wide screen movies at home. And after setting things up, I got the fonts looking good enough.

But after setting up my Outlook to pane things vertically and firing up Eclipse on it , I can't believe we haven't been using this format before. What a difference! With Eclipse, I'm always dragging the splitters left or right to reveal the outline view or the navigator views or ^M'ing and sending the Editor full screen so I can see long lines of code. Not any more. I used to use my external 19" LCD for most of my Eclipse work, but now I'm finding enjoying working in either (the 19" is at eye height and has bigger pixels so I can see them better, though).

So my favorite tool of the week is now wide screen LCD monitors! Although qemu is still right up there, and they are now working on adding OpenGL support, more on that when I find out more...

Oh, and, BTW, Blogger has a new editor for creating blog entries. I love what it just did for spell checking.

Sun GPL's Their Java

We've all been waiting to see what Sun will really do when it talks about open sourcing Java. I noticed there was a lot of mistrust amongst the open source communities, but I have no prejudices against Sun so I kept an open mind.

Today (well actually over the weekend some time), Sun officially turned on the pipes and you can download it. You can see it all at java.net. There you will find their implementations for J2ME and J2SE as well as J2EE which they had open sourced earlier. For J2SE, they only have the VM and compiler open sourced. I guess they are still working on 3rd party licensing issues to get the complete JDK contributed.

They have chosen GPL as the license with the classpath exception on the libraries so that you can link commercial code without being affected by the GPL license. I'm always a bit cautious about GPL and you really got to be careful when using it but I think it's a pretty good choice that will help avoid the forking that Sun has worried about and enable the JDK to be shipped as part of Linux distributions, which has been a pain in the you know where in the past.

Time will tell, however, how well Sun can build the community around it. If they begin to allow committers from outside of Sun, I think you'll see over time the mistrust fade. But if it becomes apparent that they aren't that serious about letting others play in the sandbox they've made, then it will all be for naught. But if it is successful, it'll be interesting to see how the Apache Harmony project is impacted since they are essentially duplicating effort but with a different license. We'll need a magic decoder ring to figure this all out...

So being the hacker that I am, I drove directly into the source tree to see what the code looked like. They are using subversion, which I really hope that we at Eclipse.org will switch to one day. I also see that the VM code is written in C++ and looks pretty clean. Which, of course, brings up the question on whether you can use the CDT to work on it. Of course you can! And I'll have to spend some time in the upcoming weeks putting a tutorial together to show how.

Interesting times ahead, of that there is no doubt.

EclipseCon 2007 is (Unnecessarily) Fair

Here we go having a debate again on Planet Eclipse. I apologize to my readers who don't follow the Planet. But then you should. It's always great reading!

As a member the EclipseCon 2007 program committee, I had to take offense to Wassim's remarks about the "Contraversial" EclipseCon 2007. Now he has all rights to state his opinion and we should all respect it and take a good look at what's going on. If he's right, then it is something we need to take a look at and make sure it is corrected.

But I think his statements are a bit off the mark. Bjorn had a nice post that summed up a lot of how I felt about it and agree 100% with what he said there. I'd like to add a bit more from the C/C++ track perspective.

First of all, I submitted a proposal for a short tutorial to the C/C++ track that I supposedly control. I did so because, at the time, I didn't have any proposals and was afraid that the C/C++ community was going to miss out on the opportunity. After doing a little recruiting I was able to convince a few members of the community to put in much better proposals than mine and I plan on rejecting mine in favour of theirs.

Now, if I do run into the situation that I have too few proposals for the tracks that have been allocated, or they are too weak, I will propose to offer them up to the rest of the Eclipse community to make sure we get good quality content. My understanding from the other committee members is that they plan on doing the same.

You can't get much more open than actually showing the allocations that have been given to the various tracks. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were being that open. I've never seen it before, and it does open us up for criticism so early in the process.

I guess what hasn't been made public is that these numbers aren't necessarily written in stone and that we already have mucked around a bit with them. And we have left the door open to do more of the same. As Bjorn mentioned, we are all focused on making the EclipseCon program the best it can be for the attendees, which will go a long way towards growing our community. And I think it's a great thing to be doing it in the open for others to comment on and help improve.

Microsoft Novell

I've been busy working on the CDT integration with the Windows SDK and, at the moment the Windows debug engine, to support C++ development using this SDK as a choice over cygwin/mingw for Windows development. As I've mentioned previously, I'm keen on getting Eclipse and the CDT in a state where it can be useful for Windows developers and open up a whole new community to this great thing we've got going with Eclipse.

Taking a break from debugging the debugger yesterday, I tripped over a Slashdot article that said there was going to be a press conference webcast at 5 p.m. EST announcing a partnership between Microsoft and Novell on Linux. After checking the calendar to mare sure it wasn't April 1, I tuned in. Watching the proceedings, I got that feeling I was watching history, like when Wayne Gretzky announced his retirement. Time will tell whether Microsoft entering the Linux/open source world will change anything, but today, it looks pretty significant.

What was clear was that it is more like Microsoft grudgingly admitting Linux is important with its customers, than Microsoft throwing in the towel. But I think that is an important admission that will change how the open source world views Microsoft and, more importantly, how the Microsoft world views open source and Linux in particular.

Which brings me back to my Windows SDK integration. One of the visions we had for the CDT in the early days, was for the CDT to be the cross platform development environment that eases the transition for Windows developers who want to start working on Linux apps. It was great in theory, but the demand didn't really materialize (and neither did the community). Time will tell whether this announcement changes that. But in the meantime, it has given me a little extra energy to try and make sure the Windows SDK integration happens for both C++ and C# (Mono may have been given a boost with this also) to at least make the path easier to follow.

CDT at the Eclipse Summit Europe

I'm having a great time here at Eclipse Summit Europe. It's the first time I've been in Europe and it's a pretty darn cool place to be. Watching TV and walking around the area has made me really want to learn German, which is my heritage anyway. And the architecture in this area of Esslingen is unbelievably amazing throwback to early Germany. Someone mentioned that it's like something Disney would build.

Jet lag had kicked in hard just before my talk on the CDT DOM so I'll apologize to everyone who was there if it seemed disorganized. I was glad to be able to get the message out on how we are doing with the CDT and the cool things we are working on. The biggest feedback was the interest in the C#DT support I want to build on the CDT. I'm just trying to prove out CDT's multi-language capability but people are intrigued by the undertones of it all.

I also met a few people who were users of the CDT. Everyone gave me positive feedback on the performance improvements with the indexer. One group had even added a few UI features to make their lives easier and I encouraged them to contribute them back to the community, which the appeared happy to do. This is a general message I should remind everyone. If you have made little improvements to the CDT, feel free to contribute them. We're certainly interested in spending time looking at patches especially as it improves the user experience for all.

Given the liveliness of the discussions in the foyer where we had lunches and get togethers, I'd say Eclipse is live and well in Europe. Certainly looking at the list of people who attended the CDT summit, Europe is an important place that we need to focus on more and ensure the community can easily span the oceans, and time zones...

Qemu, my favorite tool of the week

I've been with QNX for over a year now and I continue to learn all I can about our Neutrino operating system, and development issues faced by embedded developers in general. If I'm going to focus on tools for embedded developers, I need to get inside their shoes and walk the talk.

I've worked with a couple of development boards and that was pretty cool, especially when lights started flashing and it started communicating out the serial and ethernet ports. But carrying around a board, even a little one, is a bit cumbersome and not very practical. I've been a long time fan of VMware and have used that. But, x86 is not where the excitement is at in the mobile embedded market, so I have been looking for something that was less desktop-y to use.

Recently I ran accross an article on using Qemu, an open source processor emulator that can emulate a number of different processors and peripheral devices, to run a Debian Linux ARM installation. It also claims that on faster machines, it can even be faster than the actual ARM processors it is emulating. This is exactly what I was looking for.

So I've started down a journey of writing a Neutrino BSP (Board Support Package) for Qemu, which emulates the ARM Versatile Platform Baseboard. I have the programmers guide for this board which is a pretty good help, but thanks to the fact that I have the source for the emulator, if I have any questions about how certain registers work, I can just look at the implementation in Qemu. The architecture is very clean so it makes these things very easy to find. It also includes a gdb remote interface that acts like a JTAG interface so I can step through my code.

With all these goodies, I think I'll have Neutrino up and running in this environment in no time. Very cool! There is a tutorial floating around by James Lynch on using the CDT with a tiny ARM-based board. I should write a similar tutorial on using Qemu's ARM emulation with the CDT and make sure these environments work well. It's a great learning tool if nothing else.

Open Source, The Double Edge Sword

I know this has been talked about a lot in the open source industry, but I've personally started to see concrete examples of it. Commercial adoption of open source software is a double edge sword. One the one side, it is great to have the flexibility to be able to take open source solutions, adapt them to your particular problem domain, and add the value of those solutions to your product. On the other side, it is a lot of work to do that, and in a commercial setting, lot of work == big expense.

And, of course, you really have to watch the pointy end of the sword that could kill your project, and I think that pointy end is unrealistic expectations. But, I think the industry is really starting to get that open source != free. And, unfortunately, I think a lot of it comes from war wounds, but the lesson is getting learned.

This does, however, come back to the software as a service story I keep blabbing about. Now, you can either hire and train people to do the work, or you can contract out to a services company that (hopefully) already has the trained people to do the work for you (hopefully) cheaper. It was pretty interesting then when I noticed a little-advertised feature of the Eclipse.org web site, the Services section. It lists a few companies that are offering services to the Eclipse community. It is unfortunate that there are so few and very few with a non-Enterprise focus, but the opportunity is there for those who want to take it.

JDT/CDT, Can't we just get along?

So between putting the finishing touches on CDT 3.1.1, some QNX work items, and dealing with the various summits and stuff, I've started working a little on my CDT/Windows Debugger API integration. It didn't take too long before I got my workspace set up to work on it. I'm creating Java classes that will plug into the CDT's debug engine (or engines as the new Debug Services Framework comes together). I'm also creating C++ code to implement native methods that talk to the Windows APIs. I'm also about to figure out the right way to do callbacks from those APIs trough my C++ code up into the Java code.

I'm trying to follow as much as I can the SWT model by doing as little in the native code as possible and putting most of the logic in Java. As much as I prefer C++ to Java, I don't have a good answer to the question "How do you debug the debugger" so I'll be relying on the Java debugger and good ol' printfs to get me through.

But once you have a mix of CDT and JDT projects, the workflows aren't pretty. The first thing that hit me was when I was in the C/C++ Perspective and hit the New Class button to create a Java class. Uh, nope, that creates a C++ class. So I'm starting to find myself flipping back and forth between the Java and C/C++ perspectives to get the right navigator views and toolbar buttons at the right time. It's a pain and it would be nice if we had a "Code" perspective or something where we could write code without the context switching.

And then, there's the result of my work. When I do get the debugger integrated, I may just wish to debug my debugger or some other JNI application with it. The "Holy Grail" for us in CDT-land has always been to be able to step from Java code into C++ code and back and forth seamlessly.

We've talked about this since the first CDT get-together back in July 2002. I've tried to get it to work with some success but got sidetracked with other things. The guys at Intel presented a proposal on such an environment at our Spring summit, bit I haven't heard much about that since. I'm interested in hearing peoples' opinion on whether this is something they feel is important for Eclipse. And, of course, I'm interested in ideas on how we can build a community to help make this happen. If nothing, it will be a lot of work.

Right Place, Right Time (part 2)

Having concluded that I haven't done anything really to help guarantee the CDT's success, I do have a few mantras that are hopefully contributing to a healthy community.

1. Be open. This was actually pretty hard at first when it was only QNX and then only QNX and IBM/Rational when the only people who cared about what you were doing were sitting down the hall or across town. But with the CDT development community spread around the world, working in the open is critical. In the CDT we have healthy discussions in Bugzilla and on the cdt-dev list and are looking at ways to share ideas and work together more often and more fluidly.
2. Equality. A lot of open source projects tend to be dominated by one or two organizations and unfortunately a lot of Eclipse projects are this way. In the CDT, no one dominates. No organization has more than around 5 developers and most are around 2. And there are over 10 organizations involved. We honor the veto committer voting system so we aim to get consensus before taking big steps and usually do.
3. Spread the Word. At times I feel like I'm a part of our marketing team here at QNX, and I guess part of my role is that. You can hope people stumble onto your project and get interested, but the media has a role to play helping you spread the word. And with the number of online magazines and webinar services in business now, they are always looking for a new angle. Take advantage of it.

That's the main ones I can think of right now. The funny thing is that, as a developer, all of them go against the grain of who we are. We all love the code we write and feel we are owed some degree of ownership over it and feel we don't need to explain it to anyone. But as soon as you click that Commit button, it's out there for anyone to see, change, criticize. The best rule of thumb I have is to be open and honest about my work and to appreciate the opinions and ideas of others. We're all in this together, no matter who signs our paychecks.

Right place, Right Time (part 1)

One thing I've been asked recently is to share why the CDT is successful in the Eclipse community. It's a really hard question for me to answer since I'm not sure I can trace anything I've done as a project lead to help with this success. That and I'm not sure whether it really is successful. I've been pretty happy with its popularity with over 340,000 downloads of CDT 3.0.2 and 35 developers attending last weeks CDT summit. I think we still have a long way to go to reach the quality levels of the JDT and VisualStudio, but now that we have so much attention on the CDT, we're trying to address that. So, I think the real question is - why is the CDT so popular, and what have we done as a project to help achieve that. My answer is in two parts so I'll make this a two part blog entry.

So the first part of my answer is this: "Dumb luck", or maybe slightly less self-deprecating, "Being at the right place at the right time". QNX started the CDT back in 2002 because we needed an IDE to help developers writing applications for our operating system be more productive. Now, we're not an IDE company and seeing what IBM had in store for building an open source community around Eclipse, we reckoned that would be the right way to go for the CDT as well. The hope was that lots of other non-IDE companies needed an IDE too and we could all share the development cost of it.

It was a gamble and it did take four years to reach this point, but in the end we were right. The reason the CDT is so popular is that there is a huge need in the non-Windows market for a universal IDE that vendors and users can easily leverage for their own needs. Given the huge popularity of Eclipse and with the CDT being the C/C++ solution for Eclipse, it just becomes natural that people gravitate to the CDT. That and the CDT promises to be a high quality, feature rich C/C++ development environment that you have had to pay money for in the past. Everyone like free stuff that's good.

So in the end, I don't think we've done anything in particular to help make the CDT as popular as it is other than simply having the right solution at the right time. I wish I can claim otherwise, but it is what it is. In the next part of this blog entry, though, I will try to list some of the things we've tried aimed at making sure the CDT is an open, welcoming community that will hopefully keep this momentum going. Having something good and free helps with consumption of your open source project, but it doesn't provide any guarantees that it'll attract developers to help you build and test it.

CDT Fall Summit Wrap-up

When I finalized the agenda for the Fall Summit this year, I didn't think there was any way we'd fill up 3 days. Thinking back to last year, we really ran out of things to talk about by noon on the third day. I also figured that it would be a great idea if we had some time to go through the code and work through some of the nitty gritty details with the gang huddled around a laptop. So I decided to set aside Thursday afternoon for that.

Well, at the end if it all, given the number of topics we had to chop out and the number of items where I had to say that we were running behind, we could have spent a whole week. Mind you our brains would have been mush. They were anyway after three days. It was great to see that we have a big development community that knows a lot about the CDT and want to make it even better. It also showed that we need to do this more often, maybe not travel, but find some way to share ideas and debate even virtually.

One of the best items we had, at least for me, was at the very end. I asked the group how we could improve how the CDT is run as a software project. The answer I got back was that we need to work hard on ensuring we have quality releases. In the past, we've been very accommodating to developers, accepting that they come and go and contribute what they can when they can. But that adhoc approach to project management isn't leading to high quality releases, especially at the x.x.0 releases. The team showed a strong desire to, well, be "managed" as a software development team, much like they are when working on their own commercial projects.

So that is now my number one challenge. We need to tighten down the processes, be more strict on quality, and start putting together guidelines that we need the developers to follow. We also need to ensure that our test coverage is managed and improved. Manage the CDT much like any software development project. To me the big challenge is that none of these developers have any contractual obligation to follow any of this. And we have developers from over 10 different organizations. This is open source and they are volunteers (or at least their organizations have volunteered them). So it is going to be a bit of a delicate balance to ensure we have the right mechanisms in place and that the developers honor them.

But at the end of the day, I think just having processes and guidelines will give the developers something to follow and they will probably feel naturally obliged to follow. And with the strength of the characters that we have working on the CDT, I'm sure a little peer pressure will help too. I am very excited about moving into this next stage in the maturing of the CDT project. If it all works, maybe I'll do an MBA thesis on it :).

More Open Source Hardware

I've got Google Alerts notifying me when something comes up with Eclipse CDT and another one for Eclipse embedded. I'm starting to get a few of these a week, including two today. One came from Lattice Semiconductor. What was noteworthy in this case was they were also open sourcing the design for their 32-bit microcontroller. Now these guys are a lot smaller than Sun who open sourced the design for their Niagara 8-core Sparc chip. But I'm starting to wonder if there really is a trend happening here.

If this means we'll see more people customizing chip designs using hardware description languages and building the software that will run on them, then Eclipse is an obvious host for this kind of hardware/software codesign activity.

CDT Summit Day 1

Well we got off to a great start at the Summit today. The day went by real fast and we were all pretty burned out by the end of it so it must have been good :). One highlight for me was when I asked for hands on who was a committer. I got the 7 or so I was expecting. I then asked who had contributed patches. To my happy surprise, I got over 20. That explains why we have so many patches outstanding in bugzilla for the CDT. It is certainly one sign the CDT contributor community is healthy, but its also a sign that we have a lot of work ahead to keep up and to start nominating more committers.

We spend the day introducing eachother and then dug deep into the CDT DOM. I have to admit that one was really dry, and I was the one giving it. We then got an update from the Intel team on what they'd like to do with the build information in the new project wizard and the project properties. Looks like a big change that should hopefully smooth out some workflow issues that we have there. Another big day tomorrow as we review some of the new source navigation and indexing features and dig into debug.

Another thing I'm trying is Skypecast to broadcast the proceedings. You can check it out by following the link. It is definitely a technology preview and we had a hard time getting remote people hooked up to the sound system we have running without horrible echo and feedback. But the broadcast out sounds O.K. (as long as I mute the mic on my laptop, sorry Norbert!) I'm sure it would work better if everyone was working through headsets, instead of trying what we're doing with capturing the audio through a sound board. But it is an interesting way of communicating when working on open source projects.

CDT Summit Eve

The CDT Fall summit for this year starts tomorrow here at QNX headquarters and I'm getting both excited and nervous, as I guess I should. We've had a number of summits in the past starting all the way back with the first one in July 2002 when QNX brought the CDT as we know it to the world. That summit and pretty much everyone since then has had kind-a the same feel. Lots of people have been interested in what was going on, but few have had the resources to commit to helping out.

But you know, there's nothing wrong with that. It's a pretty difficult decision for corporations to commit resources to work on open source projects. It's difficult to track the return on their investment and there are a slough of legal issues that need to be addressed and tracked to make sure the IP walls are set up correctly, and I'm not just talking networking. I've learned to be patient, not get too down when hopes fail to materialize. In the end, simply using the CDT and distributing it in their products means that the CDT is getting good test coverage, which is just as important these days.

My feel for this one, though, is different. Maybe it's because I'm starting to be overly optimistic. We have around the same number of attendees registered as we did last year, and a lot of them are the same faces. However, this year most of the attendees have been contributors to the CDT. Some have become committers over the year and some will become committers shortly after the summit. We'll use this as an opportunity make sure we are talking to eachother and co-ordinating our work. We'll also use it as a team building exercise as I'm sure we'll find a few battles along the way. It sure helps when you know the person at the other end of the bugzilla entry when smoothing over issues.

Finally this year, it looks like our contributors summit will focus much less on recruiting contributors and much more on co-ordinating actual contributions. It's a much funner summit to run and hopefully a much funner summit to attend.

Open Source Hardware

I'm sure I've told this story before somewhere, but I used to sit across from an ASIC designer many years ago. This is when I first started using ObjecTime Developer for software modeling back in the early 90's, a couple of years before I joined the company. He was marveling at how we software designers had started using graphical tools, just as ASIC designers were abandoning similar tools for textual description languages. I'm not sure why they made that transition, but given the complexity of the chips they were designing, my bet is that the graphics didn't scale well for them and the tools back in the early 90's weren't very good - no Eclipse back then!

This guy was coding in a hardware description language called Verilog. I peaked over his shoulder one day and saw that it looked a lot like C code. I found that very interesting but it took many years before I sat down and took the time to learn a bit more about the language and what it could do (there wasn't much of an Internet back then either). It indeed was C-like and was structured a lot like C, and I'm sure suffers the same scalability issues that programming in C can sometimes cause. Thankfully, there is an Eclipse plug-in to help you write your own Verilog code.

Fast forward to the recent future and my interest in MultiCore processing, I found it quite interesting when Sun announced that they were open sourcing their Niagara line of processors. Diving deeper, I was able to find the Verilog code for their T1 chip published on www.opensparc.org. Other than being cool to look at and maybe interesting for students to learn CPU design with, I didn't really see the benefits of open sourcing a CPU design.

Then yesterday, I ran across an announcement from Simply RISC that their engineers had taken the open source T1 code and made a simple SPARC embedded processor out of it. Of course with the T1 source being GPLed, they have released the source for their CPU as well. Is this the start of something? I'm still a bit doubtful. Chip companies make most of their money on the designs they come up with, not necessarily the chips themselves. But it is an interesting phenomenum to watch out for.

MultiCore: The True Promise of Eclipse

So, I needed a board to help try out some JTAG things (for those readers not involved with embedded development, a board is a little computer kind-a thing). We had just received an OMAP board which uses a TI chip that contains both an ARM general purpose processor as well as a TI DSP (digital signal processor). Of course, my focus was on the ARM processor that runs our operating system and it was pretty cool to getting it up and running with little effort.

But after a while, I started wondering what people use this board for. I've been away from embedded development for a few years and man have things changed while I was away. I soon discovered that the main use of this thing is for audio processing. There are some audio jacks as well as a connector to plug in an LCD screen. By programming some audio processing algorithms into the DSP, you could make a pretty cool multimedia device with this thing.

My curiosity then wondered over to how one would program the DSP. If I had a compiler with an integration with the CDT and a debugger that understood how to debug the DSP and that was also integrated with the CDT, then I'd then have a complete multi-core development solution where I could have regular software projects and DSP projects and work on them all at the same time.

It's a very interesting time in the embedded industry with the multi-core phonmenun. I think we'll see a lot of new processors come out that have specialized parts. What I hope to see, and I'm pretty sure it will happen, is different vendors working together integrating their Eclipse-based technologies and unify their development activities into a single workflow for the developer who sees these boards as a single target. That is the true promise of Eclipse!

Did someone say doughnuts?

I just read Bjorn's note comparing doughnut stores to open source businesses. From what I hear that note probably made more an impact on Canadians that it did others. For some reason, we've rallied around the doughnut as our national past time and our waste-lines are paying the price!

At any rate, I totally agree with his assessment. My spin on it, you can make money by packaging up open source and selling priority support for it, and you can make money by taking open source and customizing it for a small vertical market. Certainly we at QNX are doing the second, taking Eclipse and customizing it to work well for developers writing applications for our operating system.

Another analogy I thought of also has to do with Tim Hortons. After Wendy's (the burger Wendy's) merged with Tim Hortons you started seeing a lot of Wendys and Timmy's co-located in the same restaurant. So the analogy could go that people love doughnuts. So when the come to Tim's and get their fix, they see the Wendy's there and decide to stay for lunch.

So what I've also seen vendors do is package Eclipse as a sort of loss leader to get people interested in their higher margin products. My recent blog on the JTAG vendor Ronetix is an example of that. And I think we'll see a lot more as well as Eclipse becomes ubiquitous (2.27 million users!). Vendors will find they have to play the Eclipse game just to keep up with the Jones.

Windows SDK RC1

I've stated a few times now that although the CDT is highly used in the embedded and Linux/Unix markets, I don't think we've conquered the world until the CDT is seen as a valid alternative to Visual Studio for Windows development. Looking at the whole Eclipse ecosystem and all the components available for it, I just think it has a higher value proposition than Visual Studio. At the very least you get a cross platform development environment that you can theoretically build any application with, once all the pieces are there that is.

So I've been working a little on adapting the CDT for Windows development starting with support for Microsoft's C++ compiler. Over the last couple of years they've been shipping it for free, first as a separate toolkit, and now as part of the .Net 2.0 SDK. But, in order to get it working, you had to download a few pieces, including the Platform SDK, and if you wanted to do debugging outside of Visual Studio, the Debugging Tools for Windows. I felt it was pretty complicated to set up, especially for newbies, and of course these pieces aren't redistributable so we couldn't shrink wrap it for you.

But someone pointed me at the new Windows SDK which is part of the Vista program (which is why I was confused since I thought it was a Vista thing only, but it is not). This SDK has recently reached Release Candidate 1. As described in this MSDN TV program (these programs are pretty useful and something we should consider for Eclipse), this new SDK is really a combination of all the pieces you need to build Windows applications, both managed (i.e. .Net) and unmanaged (i.e. native).

What I found interesting was their focus on providing command line tool support for "people who like to work that way". Now, I don't know anyone developing Windows applications that like to work that way. So I read into it that they are really talking about 3rd party IDEs such as the CDT. With the tools provided by this SDK, it should be a pretty simple matter of integrating them as a tool chain just as we do with the gnu tools. Download the SDK, download the CDT and the Windows integration, and you are off and running.

At least that's my hope, which of course will only be successful if it receives community attention. But it sure would be a boost for Eclipse to be seen as the development environment for everyone, without prejudice.

CDT everywhere

I continue to be surprised by how many vendors are redistributing the CDT with their products. Lately I've become interested in JTAG hardware debuggers and how to best hook them up to Eclipse for some real low level bit hacking debug workflows. This is something that probably deserves it's own blog entry and it's not really the theme of this story.

At any rate, I ran across a JTAG vendor called Ronetix who appears to build a pretty full featured device similar to the Abatron device I've been playing with lately. So quickly browsing Ronetix web site, I see that they have a Starter Kit that they sell. Low and behold it "Includes Eclipse IDE". Going to the product page for the starter kit I see they have a screenshot of Eclipse in action, and, yes, it is the CDT.

At some point I need to sit down and figure out what is driving the success of the CDT. It certainly fills a need that maybe isn't getting addressed by others, i.e., an IDE for non-Windows development that is extensible and ubiquitous (mind you I'm still keen on CDT for Windows development too). I'll have to ask the 34 developers that are currently registered for the upcoming CDT Contributors Summit why they find the CDT important enough to invest in. No matter the reason, it's been a fun ride and we're looking forward to a great year of collaboration toward CDT 4.0.