Navel Gazing

Man, we're sure doing a lot of navel gazing on Planet Eclipse about the future of Eclipse, thanks a lot to Bjorn's own navel gazing. I'm not sure why we are doing this since I am sure that Mike and the gang do that quite a lot themselves already and I'm not sure we're helping.

Anyway, I think it is a natural process to go through at this stage of Eclipse's life. Since the original consortium was created back in November 2001 (according to wikipedia, but I think that's pretty accurate), the software industry has changed a lot as you'd expect in 7+ years. Open source was pretty new back then and it was a bold move by IBM to start this thing. And, at the time, having an organization to promote and manage the growth Eclipse was critical to it's success. It made open source friendly to companies that feared it and it really pushed them into a new way of thinking.

Fast forward to today, there's no doubting that open source is now, not only accepted, but for many companies, it's the preferred way of working, especially on commodity platforms. Companies that used to play commercially in that space have moved on to higher ground or found niches to sell their wares, or disappeared all together, or are Microsoft. Open source is a commercial force, no matter what the Free Software people would like to think.

So what does this mean for Eclipse? I'm not sure. And that's why I am appreciating the navel gazing going on. What should it mean?

That made me wonder about Linux. Yes, it has a Foundation, but in the timeline of Linux, that's actually a fairly new development. Linux survived for years as a free software project. But if you look at the latest stats that I found (Apr 2008), you'll see that more that 3/4's of Linux development is done by developers that work for commercial vendors that have a vested interest in it. Surprisingly 9% of that development is by IBM.

I think it's pretty easy to imagine that if horrible things came to pass and the Foundation ceased to exist, Eclipse would live on. And for the same reasons Linux has. Too many companies have a vested interest in it to leave it for dead. And yes, the larger companies would want some sort of insurance against bad things, so you'll always need a Foundation, just like Linux has.

But how influential should that Foundation and the members that support it be in the day to day operation of Eclipse developers? Right now, it's a lot. The freedom of developers is very restricted relative to other open source projects. For some, it's even more restrictive than what their employers allow. And, sure, it's less restrictive than many commercially sponsored open source projects (OpenOffice comes to mind). But where are we on the open source project health scale? Or does that matter at all? Are things really all that bad right now?

No, no solution to the navel gazing here, and I guess more questions than answers. But it is a good time to think about it. Or maybe, I'm just doing my own navel gazing...

Writing Eclipse Plug-ins in C++

Well, not the entire plug-in. But I thought that would get your attention.

After spending a while mulling around with embedded Linux and Qt and qemu and thinking about OpenGL ES and how I'd build a handheld console or set top box that had a 3D graphical environment using something like Clutter, I'm now trying to figure out what kind of tools you'd need for such a world where 3D graphics was common place.

That led me back to something I tried a couple of years ago, trying to get OpenGL rendering in Eclipse. The idea was to provide a complete tool suite for building 3D games in Eclipse. We have C/C++ covered with the CDT. You might also want some 3D modeling tools for building characters and scenes. Why couldn't that be in the Eclipse environment as well. Yes, these are usually done by different people, but I'm thinking of the small, independent developer shops where that may not be true.

The OpenGL canvas widget in SWT makes this pretty easy. I installed the LWJGL library that allows you to make OpenGL calls in Java and I got the Snippet that draws a torus spinning around in an SWT window running. Very cool.

But as I often mentioned here, I "hate" Java (well, it's pretty much a love/hate relationship since I still pick it for my day job on Eclipse technologies). I want to have the option of using native CPU capabilities like SIMD instructions you get with the SSE family instructions. So I'd prefer to do as much as possible in C++.

So I did that. I got rid of the LWJGL code and replaced it with my own native library that implemented an init, resize, and draw routine. Essentially this is all the code needed to render into the canvas and you can do the rest with a few Java calls to set the current context and to swap the buffers. Very very cool. Now to get this running in an Eclipse editor and we're off to the races.

Here's a snapshot of what I have so far. And yeah, it looks like the LWJGL version, but, trust me, all the OpenGL code is in C++ behind the three native methods:

Planet Eclipse Ego?

I was trying to point a buddy of mine (who actually should know better, but anyway) to Planet Eclipse. He replied, it takes me here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Eclipse_Ego. I laughed long and hard.

So is it true? Is there a Planet Eclipse Ego? I'm probably guilty on that a bit. I find myself yearning to post to see my name up on the Planet, instead of just waiting to write something people would actually care about. But almost all the other posts are very informative and I don't see much evidence of any sort of "ego". Not much anyway ;).

BTW, Pat posted a comment on my last blog about being interested to pay a couple of bucks for the CDT if he could get it off an App Store. Maybe that's the answer on how to get more funding for Eclipse development. And it plays inadvertently into Bjorn's suggestion to stop doing builds at Eclipse. If you want Eclipse for free, check it out and build it yourself, just like with most other open source packages. If you want someone to do that for you, belly up to the App Store and get yours for cheap. Hmm...

App stores, the new economy?

You can't help but appreciate what Apple is doing with it's App Store which recently sold it's one billionth app the other day. That's a lot of apps, and that's a lot of money going from the consumer's pocketbook to the software developer and Apple. Apparently the Apple App Store now has around 35,000 apps listed. A lot of them are free and almost all of them are available for under $10. Certainly accessible to the masses.

Being a software developer, I can't help but envy the guys who are writing these apps. You hear the stories of guys who worked weekends in their basement to make good but simple apps that rake in revenue in the 6 digits in a matter of months. I don't think there are a lot of similar stories, but it does raise the eyebrows.

I'm also not clear how open Apple is with it's development environment. From what I've been told, you have to buy it from them. It's cheap, only $99 to get started. But their environment only runs on Macs of course and the feedback I've been hearing is that their Xcode IDE isn't anything to write home about. And there is interest in bringing Eclipse and the CDT into the picture.

So the question that comes to my mind is whether this success can be replicated by someone else. And, in particular, I'm looking at all these ARM SOCs with 3D graphics and multimedia decoding hardware running embedded Linux. It looks like this should be a no brainer.

Or is it? These platforms are easy to build but technology doesn't make an industry. My son has an iPod Touch and it's a pretty slick device that I'm sure cost Apple more than the $200 we paid for it, or at least they're breaking even on it. No, to build a successful platform, you need an ecosystem and that ranges from the SDK the developer uses, to easy access to their wares via an app store or such, to slick looking hardware consumers crave.

It's no easy task, and I see attempts by the open source source community with platforms such as Open Pandora doomed to failure. It's ugly, clunky, expensive, and lacking that ecosystem to make it successful. I appreciate their attempt. And I think it could work, if you got the big handheld vendors involved to build the hardware, and then used open platforms and tools, such as Linux and Eclipse, to build the apps, and then some one to build and maintain the app store to spread the wealth. But then maybe I'm dreaming or wouldn't someone have done this by now?

Update: I totally forgot about Android and it's app store. But then I'm so totally biased against Java right now, I find it hard to imagine you'll ever see the sleek apps that Apple has. I'm just weird that way. But I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Eclipse is a Drug and other Musings

I haven't written anything here in the last few days and was starting to get the urge to write something, anything. I feel compelled to say something about Bjorn's impending departure from the Eclipse Foundation. But I'm not sure I have much to say. As I mentioned in a previous post, he wears his emotions on his sleeve at times so I wasn't particularly surprised. But I too have a sense of change at Eclipse having been involved for almost seven years now.

Maybe it's because I'm very part time on the CDT in my current job and miss working daily in the open. But I look around the CDT project and see the same is true for many of us. And yeah, the CDT has a lot of functionality today already and we're pretty much in maintenance mode. But there are some cool things we've started talking about, like introducing static code analysis capabilities, and the build system is in much need of a redo. I think there's enough there to generate excitement, I just wish I had more time to promote that. But we'll see what I can do anyway.

And that's the theme of this post. For most of us working on Eclipse, it is very much like a drug. I'm hooked on it. We see a lot of people leaving companies only to find them pop up at another company that also works on Eclipse. We've even seen high profile Eclipse people leave the safety of their mothership to strike out on their own as Eclipse consultants to continue to help feed the Eclipse ecosystem. Once you've been there, you understand why. There are so many good people and so many high profile companies involved at Eclipse, it's certainly a high to be working at it.

So I don't worry about Bjorn leaving. I know he's hooked too and won't go far ;).

BTW, just ran across a blog entry describing how to use the CDT for Linux programming with OpenGL, something I've started to focus on in my hobby time. The instructions are a bit out dated, and I should do some real webinar tutorials on how to do things like this. But I'm fixated on the blog because it has a music player embedded into it and is playing some of my favorite metal bands :). Cool blog marketing trick. BTW, blogging is a drug too ;)

Fun with Qemu/Qt

Just for fun (and maybe profit), I thought I'd try and get Qt running on the mini ARM Linux setup that I used for my tutorial at EclipseCon. Low and behold, all I had to do was build it with the compiler I got from CodeSourcery for ARM and it worked!

Now there isn't a whole lot of magic here. It's using the Linux framebuffer device that draws to the screen. I'm not sure how it would look on a real device but it looked might fine on qemu. Here's a snapshot of it running on my laptop, which is now solidly Fedora. It's running the browser demo app and has loaded my blog just before I posted this. It took a little while to load and render, but again, it looked pretty good.



Having gotten this far, I start to wonder how much better it would be if I had OpenGL ES emulation in qemu. Would it be faster? Curiosity might kill this cat...

WolfenQt: Proof in pudding

An update to my previous post. As proof I got it working, here's my blog from earlier today. You can't see the flash since apparently the adobe flash player bypasses the widget set and opens a native window directly. Wonder where it showed up... At any rate, lots of fun. And with OpenGL mode turned on, performs quite nicely and the widgets are quite readable. Click on the picture to see full size. Very nice.

Widgets in 3D: WolfenQt

As the shiny balls spin around in my world, Qt has jumped back into the foreground. My Fedora laptop is busy building 4.5 as I write this and slowly catching on fire (man these things get hot when they're busy working). While that was going on, I took another look at how you'd implement Qt widgets in 3D space, kind of like Clutter does in a GTK fashion (mind you I think those are just static 2D images, not widgets).

Low and behold, I came across the Qt Lab Blog entry by someone there who actually has a demo of Qt widgets running in a maze similar to the old id games. He called it WolfenQt. Take a look here:



Very cool! This is exactly how I was hoping it would look and feel. And Qt has the framework to make it happen. I need to do some experimentation with it once I my 4.5 compiled to see how much of this is done in OpenGL versus software rendering. Looking at the code it looks like quite a mix of both. But from the video, it looks fast enough. And I do know the marching guy is rendered using OpenGL at least.

This is the kind of innovation I'd love to see. We talk a lot in the Eclipse world about Java thick clients and Browser/Server architectures. But there's still so much more you can do using native APIs that take advantage of all the new hardware acceleration capabilities that today's platform providers are giving us.

And the CDT is such a natural IDE for this new world. With all these new platforms, developers really need a cross platform cross target development environment to work with them all. The goal for my CDT work right now is to show that off and put together IDE packages, like Wascana and maybe something with DSDP for embedded, that can be used in these environments.

On the future of Eclipse

Another great post by Bjorn on life at Eclipse in the new world and a great follow up by Michael Scharf on his thoughts on major changes needed to get there. These two posts made me think about what I'd like to see as a way to take Eclipse forward into the future.

Bjorn draws up a nice, clean looking "architecture" on how the cycle of value feeds the Eclipse ecosystem. Committer -> Project -> Product -> Profit -> Committer... Unfortunately there's a week point in this cycle which I fear will blow the whole thing up, and that's the assumption that vendors making profit on Eclipse-based products will be compelled to fund Committers working on open source projects feeding those products. I've seen too many vendors in this position not do that.

It's frustrating to see so many products based on the CDT and less than half of them contribute back to improve the CDT. Maybe the existing committers have done so good a job that they don't have to. Or maybe they're not big enough to devote developers to the cause in a significant fashion to justify the cost. What ever the case, we all know how hard it to bring in new contributors. You need to "Create the Need" for them to come. It certainly isn't out of good will, especially in these times.

Assuming the cycle fails all together, how do we ensure Eclipse projects remain healthy with new contributions? Michael brings up a solution that I've wanted to see for a while. He brings it up from an architectural perspective, which is what he does :), but I bring it up from a political perspective. The members should fund a team of core developers to ensure critical Eclipse projects continue to grow. These developers would be vendor neutral other than to follow the wishes of the members. The Foundation can help co-ordinate this but it's really on the Eclipse membership to make it happen.

The best example of this I know is with the Linux Foundation where they state that one of their goals is "Protecting and Supporting Linux Development". Now Linus doesn't work for the Foundation, but the members do fund his work there to ensure he can continue to work full-time and independently on the kernel. I'm not sure how well this is working in practice, especially with people other than Linus. But it's worthy of a look.

Interestingly enough, a lot of the members of the Linux Foundation are also members of the Eclipse Foundation. But, would such a policy work at Eclipse?

The Rise of the User Community

I'm a big Bjorn fan. I've gotten to know him pretty well in my years of involvement with Eclipse. There is no mistaking his passion for open source communities and he's like me, he wears his emotions on his sleeve when things aren't going as well as they could. I'm really enjoying his series on the State of Eclipse. Most of his points I totally agree with based on my experience with CDT, e.g., the need for Diversity and the continuing battle between the User and Vendor communities over the need of an Eclipse product that users can count on, where as I stated in the comments, this is an area that is fundamentally broken at Eclipse.

However, I can't agree that his solution of relying on the members to provide free distributions of Eclipse to replace the distros available at eclipse.org, is the right solution. I'll go further and say it won't even work. As I also stated in the comments, the members that produce commercial IDEs do so in competition with the free distros from Eclipse.org. Making a free distro available from their web sites and supported by them makes no business sense, and knowing sales people as I do, they'll veto it immediately to protect their revenue. Some companies may differ and that's the only hope I see for it.

And there's another reason why the distros at eclipse.org are important. There is a growing list of large User companies that are beginning to contribute to Eclipse to support the free distribution with their user base. You'll notice that the CDT has committers from Google and Ericsson, both of which are examples of this. Without their contributions, the CDT would certainly be worse off. I also met with another such large vendor at EclipseCon who also promised as their developers get up to speed they'll be contributing.

For the CDT, this is the most promising area of growth in the contributor community, and these guys rely on the distros from Eclipse.org. I'm not about to shoot myself in the foot and even if the Foundation put a stop to this (which Mike assures us won't happen), I'd still make a C/C++ IDE available from the CDT store.

It's been a great debate and that's what's so great about open source communities. Everyone has the freedom to state their opinion, Bjorn included. Take advantage of that and think about what they are saying. You might find yourself changing your mind. But don't do it in this case ;).

Putting on my Fedora

Well, I did it, I finally did it. I ordered a 320GB drive and set up a dual boot situation with my old Windows install and my spanking brand new Fedora 10 on the rest of the disk. So far so good. It wasn't a perfect process, including a 4 hour shrink of my NTFS partition. But I'm up and running. And I have an out to go back if things go bad, but I have a feeling I won't.

I have a Dell D830 and had to install the Broadcom wireless driver and the nVidia driver for my NVS 140M graphics chip. Now, since these aren't under open source licenses, you have to get them from other sources, in my case rpmfusion.org. This is part of what sets Fedora apart from Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, it's a lot easier to set this up. You know you can mix GPL and !GPL and it's OK ;). At any rate, I deal with it since I feel Fedora is a bit crisper, especially for those of us who think they know what they're doing.

So why would I bother doing this? With Eclipse, Windows is a pretty fine development environment. The command line environments there are abysmal, but that's why we work hard on ensuring that you can do all your work from inside Eclipse. But that's probably it. I want to get back into an environment where command line is king (I used HP and Sun workstations long before becoming a Windows developer) and get a better feeling for what development life is like there. That and as I've mentioned before here, Linux is just the best environment for building embedded Linux platforms which is my hobby as of late.

Anyway, we'll see how long I last here before running back to Windows. As I have it, it's not too far away just in case, just over there on /dev/sda1 and in a VM coming soon.

Twitter is the future

I guess twitter is the next great thing in communication:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology

EclipseCon notes and git

Well, I'm back at my day job at Wind and am doing a little reflection on what happened last week at EclipseCon. Despite the rumored lower attendence, I met with pretty much as many people as I do every year, maybe even slightly more. And hopefully that'll translate into growth in the CDT community.

And I guess my talk on building communities was a little over the top on the subject of project "takers" that I had a number of people come up to me and apologize and offer to contribute in the future. I certainly didn't mean to offend or criticize. I just wanted to prepare project contributors that there are vendors and people who are happy to take your work for free and not give anything back. And, while that's frustrating, with open source licensing there's nothing you can really do about it but be mentally prepared to see it happen.

The one area where I saw a very interesting rise in momentum was with distributed version control at Eclipse and git in particular. It started with discussions at the councils on Sunday where it became obvious that we need significant community interest and willingness of the projects to drive this home to justify the significant cost to the Foundation. There were a couple of BOFs and panels that I missed but it sounds from Karl's post that the activity was significant enough for the Foundation to start putting a plan together. Very cool!

The more I talk to people and dig into it, I think git and DVCS in general is probably one of the most significant technologies driving change in the way we work on software development projects since objects invaded our world. As evidence of that, the thought of distributed source repositories opens the door to the IDE in the Cloud. The Cloud could be built around git repos and if I need to work disconnected, or work with command line tools, I just clone it onto my laptop and merge back later. And being the old "curmudgeon" C/C++ embedded tools guy, that's a significant admission...

IDE in the Cloud

There's been a lot of talk at EclipseCon here about the "IDE in the Cloud". I missed it but apparently the Mozilla Bespin demo at the e4 talk was quite impressive. It is easy to set up, and it's pretty fast as a code editor. I guess that makes sense since browsers have been heavily optimized for fast display of textual and graphical content. So I have to admit, it's led me to reconsider this technology. Rational tried this many years ago, remember Catapulse?, to build hosted development environments. The idea, and the company, collapsed in the high-tech bust of 2001. Maybe they were just too early.

But as we start to rely on the cloud, what happens when the sky's are clear? I just heard Kevin McGuire say that, hey, my e-mail is on the server, why shouldn't my code be there too. I use Outlook and Thunderbird in a mode that downloads my e-mail to my machine so I can access it disconnected. I don't always have access to the cloud. Until the cloud is omni-present, through things like metropolitan wireless schemes, and cheep, $10/day at my hotel wasn't cheep, then I don't see it really taking off as the typical way you do software development.

I just worry that the whole "Cloud" paradigm is being pushed by the people that can profit most from it, not from an inherit need of potential users.

CDT Code Introspection APIs

I'm just sitting in Markus's talk on the APIs the CDT provides to create code models, ASTs, the Indexer and ways of getting information out of there. These facilities are used to implement features such as content assist and open declaration and searching, etc. And you can use it too for all your static analysis needs. A copy of his presentation is available from the EclipseCon site by following the link to gPublication. It's a great reference on how to get started.

http://www.eclipsecon.org/2009/sessions?id=685

Slides from my Talk on the CDT Community

I'm not sure why the EclipseCon submission system isn't accepting this but here are the slides from my talk on the Rise and Fall and Rise of the CDT, Lessons on Building Communities. I had a lot of fun creating and presenting this talk. I guess it's a passion of mine and people seemed to like it. The slides have few words on it and I'd be happy to give more details if you have any questions. Feel free to add comments here.

Rise and Fall and Rise of CDT

View more presentations from dschaefer1.

A Great EclipseCon Already

I've been here at EclipseCon for 48 hours and it's been great already. I've met a lot of people here, like I always do, and it's a good sign that vendors still see Eclipse as important, enough to spend the money in these tough times to send their technical experts.

EclipseCon is an important conference, especially for those who are looking to get started with Eclipse and to grow their expertise. There's probably not enough time to learn it all, but at least you know where to go look when you get home.

It's also important for projects to get the word out about the great work their doing and to grow their community. I was pretty disappointed about the number of submissions I had for the C/C++ category. But we're making due. And it's good to see the number of DSDP contributors here giving talks so we're still showing the world that Eclipse is more than just a Java IDE.

Other things to report:
- work on ObjectiveC is starting and the guys managed to get a prototype running based on CDT late last night.
- the Ada project is looking to reboot.
- e4 talks are the hottest ticket in town
- adding git continues to be controversial and we really need to get a bigger ground swell of contributors who care about making this happen

Anyway, beer time. More later.

POWERVR goes MP

I was just reading up on the news that Imagination Technologies has launched a new generation of their architecture that drives POWERVR. What's POWERVR, you ask? It's a good question, but chances are, if you have a mobile device that has 3D accelerated graphics, it's driven by this hugely popular silicon IP.

The big news is that even they're going multi-core to achieve scalable graphics. They claim they rival the performance of discrete graphics chipsets, which I assume means the nVidias and ATI's of the world. That's a pretty interesting combination when you look at the latest chips that have multi-core ARM processors combined with DSPs (digital signal processors) for audio/video processing, which can then be combined with these powerful 3D cores.

I can imagine some really powerful handheld and other mobile devices based on these things. I just wonder about power consumption, the eternal challenge for mobile developers. We'll see how that plays out, but the power of these things also blurs the gap between mobile and x86 based "netbooks" and even set-top boxen. Interesting times ahead, indeed.

But as good as the hardware is, you still need the software to make them come to life. It's going to be an exciting time for developers that target this market. I just wonder if there are enough of them. This is one area where I'm hoping the Eclipse DSDP and CDT projects can help. We need an easy to setup package to give the students and hobbyists, the future commercial developers for these platforms, the tools they need to get them started. This is something I'd be happy to talk about at EclipseCon and see if we can get a community to start putting this together.

Should Wascana get Qt?

I've been working on my EclipseCon talk and tutorial, which I'm really looking forward to now. Especially the talk where I hope to share some of the things I learned being involved with the CDT project for almost seven years now. And I'm hopeful it's useful to others working in open source, especially the things that didn't work as well as I hoped...

Anyway, while doing that, I've started playing with Qt, which was recently released with LGPL as one of the choices for licensing. That eliminates one of the hurdles I have for including it into Wascana, my CDT for Windows distribution. So now the question is, should I include it? Should I also keep wxWidgets? Since the Wascana plan is to become a p2-based distribution, there should be no harm in having both. It's just that I don't use wxWidgets so I'm not sure whether what I'm producing works or not.

Why that matters is because I build the libraries for Wascana myself using the gcc/g++ I distribute with it. I've switched over to tdragon.net as my supplier for gcc, mainly because they (or he?) provides the latest releases from gcc (and the mingw.org community is a bit of a mess). And I want to make sure these libraries are built with the latest and greatest optimization algorithms gcc is providing.

At any rate, I'm learning how to build Qt and it's running right now. I hope it doesn't melt my laptop. They have a ton of example and demo projects that I can use to test so it's a pretty good environment for producing quality distros.

I should also look at their Eclipse plug-ins. They provide an installer for the Windows version which installs into an existing Eclipse. I wish they had a p2 repo that I could use instead. But I'll have to see what they're laying down and understand their licensing to see whether I can make these available in Wascana as well. I still find it weird they have their own IDE, Qt Creator, when it should be pretty easy to put together an Eclipse-based IDE that does almost the same, if not more...

Emulation versus Multi-Platform

Over the last little while, when I could steal away a few minutes from my busy day job as of late, I've been thinking more about open platforms for handheld and set top consoles that makes good use of the 3D hardware that is becoming common place in these platforms. Of course, being open, I'm talking about open source and royalty free APIs like Linux and OpenGL and OpenGL ES.

I've been very excited about the LGPL'ing of the Qt C++ application framework. The programming paradigm is very clean and the library set is huge, including my favorite, the WebKit browser, and, of course, OpenGL support.

One angle I've been following is my other favorite piece of open source software, the qemu CPU emulator. The community is very active there and they're are more and more platforms and hardware components being emulated making it a nice platform to play with some of the concepts I'm thinking of.

But the one critical piece missing is 3D hardware emulation. I would be great if someone could put that together, and given the comments on my previous blog entries, it would be very popular. I could do it, but I have the bigger picture in mind and have some other things I'd like to work on, in particular, a port of the Clutter concepts to Qt (and no, the QGraphicsView is close but not quite what I was thinking of).

Thinking about it tonight, it struck me. Since Qt is multi-platform and the tools I use, gcc and the CDT are multi-platform too, why don't I just start this work on Windows using Wascana, the Eclipse CDT/mingw gcc package I am also trying to work on. I could even use the OpenGL ES emulation libraries that are out there to make sure these ideas work with OpenGL ES, another multi-platform component. And as my work here progresses, I will have the opportunity to use the same tools to make it work on real hardware.

It's this type of environment that motivates my work on the CDT and what makes it so powerful. It's time to put it to work for me.

Qemu 0.10.0 now available

In a message from Anthony Liguori to the qemu-devel mailing list, "The QEMU team is pleased to announce the availability of the 0.10.0 release. This release has been a year in the making and is the result of almost 3,000 changesets from around 80 developers." The release was quickly put together in the last few days (i.e. in Eclipse terms, there wasn't much of a ramp down). And the resulting build is actually pretty hard to find, at least until it gets propagated to all the mirrors, but it's a milestone anyway.

There's a pretty long list of new targets and hardware emulation. There's also improvements to the VNC support. The biggest news is the new code generator for translating op codes into runnable code. It's called TCG (Tiny Code Generator according to Wikipedia) and removes the dependency qemu had on gcc 3.x, which means it gets to take advantage of the huge performance improvements of gcc 4.x. I think I read somewhere that the Android qemu was running 1.5 times faster thanks to that. And my copy is humming using the gcc 4 I'm integrating into the future Wascana 1.0.

This release is a good sign that the qemu developers are getting serious about formal releases. It's been quite a while since the last release and there has been huge architectural change. That has led to a some difficulties co-ordinating with the other projects that use it, like the kvm Linux virtualization platform. Having quality releases more often will make it easier to get changes from forks into the mainline, which is good for everyone.

For me, it's just good fun to be able to have a virtual platform to try different ideas with C/C++ libraries that target mobile devices that I could easily target to real hardware some day. And I think it's intriguing the Eclipse integrations we could do to make it easier to work in that environment. A lot we have already, like CDT (of course) and the Remote System Explorer for launching, and there is work on more coming from the Tools for mobile Linux project. Interesting indeed.

Qt 4.5 Full of Surprises

Qt 4.5 was released today. As expected, it comes with the adoption of the LGPL license which should make Qt free for commercial development if you so choose. I think this will be a huge boost to the adaptability of Qt and hopefully make an impact in the Gnome versus KDE Linux desktop wars (mind you the KDE gang are really shot themselves in the foot when they released 4.x as a planned regression from 3.x).

There were a couple of big surprises that came with the release announcement. First was the discontinuation of Qt's embedded product, formerly and lovingly known as Qtopia, the best product name in the business ;). The plan I understand is to fold that functionality into the Qt mainline releases with the intention of making Qt a truely cross platform API for both desktop and mobile. And they've started by introducing an OpenGL ES paint engine into this release, which if I understand correctly will allow you to use Qt to create apps for mobile devices now.

The other big surprise, isn't really a surprise since I've known about and wondered what was going to happen, but they've released a 1.0 version of their IDE, Qt Creator. It appears they are going forward with this IDE as a key offering, and have released it as LGPL as well. Which means, theoretically, a community could form behind it and it could start to compete with Eclipse. We'll need to do a thorough analysis and understand what it all means. Especially since they also uprev'ed their Eclipse integration and have a beta of their Visual Studio integration available. How does Qt Creator fit into this world?

The only thing that really bugged me in their news release on Qt Creator is their claim that "it provides the first IDE designed specifically for cross-platform development". Uh, guys. The CDT is 7 years old and counting...

Way too much fun with qemu

As I've been blogging about lately, I'm getting ready for my EclipseCon tutorial which will walk the attendees through adding support for a cross-compile environment to the CDT. The target of this environment will be qemu running a tiny Linux platform which includes the latest release kernel, busybox, dropbear with sftp-server from OpenSSH, using the free glibc C run-time and gcc cross compile tools from CodeSourcery.

I'm using the default ARM target for the latest qemu which unfortunately has a bug in the FIFO emulation that interfaces with the emulated SecureDigital card where I want my root file system. I asked on the qemu-devel list and someone there sent me a patch they had posted a couple of weeks ago. Checking out the qemu source from svn into the CDT, I was able to fix up the function where this was done and I was quickly up and running with my root file system on the SD card image. Very, very cool!

The next highlight was when I got the ssh components running and I was able to connect to the qemu target using the Remote System Explorer from the Eclipse Target Management project. Also, very, very cool. I want to use RSE and the CDT remote launch to get the results of the build up and running on the target.

So now that I know how to build stuff from the command line, the next step will be the meat of the tutorial, creating the managed build integration for the cross compiler. Of course, you'll have to come to the tutorial to see the result, and actually work with me though the process. But it should be fun!

And now that I've actually started working with qemu in the CDT, I'm starting to get that itch to add 3D graphics support again...

Subversive vs. Subclipse

One of the most common Google searches I see in my Feedjit log is from people looking for help in the whole Subversive versus Subclipse debate. It has always dumbfounded me why we have two efforts building Eclipse team providers for Subversion. But I've long given up on fighting that battle.

So as I start to dive into the code for qemu, I found myself in need of making that choice again. Some would say go with Subversive since it's an Eclipse project. I would, but they are mired in provisioning hell with a key component for making it work being on another site due to licensing/IP reasons. That didn't turn me on much so I'm going with Subclipse.

And so far so good, but I've only just checked out the repository. We'll see how it goes if I need to make any patches, and as I keep updating. But my hope is that as it has aged, all the issues I saw a couple of years ago have been addressed.

My heart is still with distributed version control and git in particular. And there is discussions on the qemu list about moving to git. And in particular, I'm very interested in how these team providers work with the CDT and how they work with the changes were doing for e4 on the IResource front. And it's pretty clear that these plug-ins, no matter what version control system they target, need to work well to keep our users and customers engaged.

CDT 6.0 M5 is Available, BTW

I've been "nose to the grindstone" since the holiday break getting our Wind River Installer out the door, twice. But the good news is that the CDT contributors have been very busy working on CDT 6.0 while I wasn't looking very hard. I have been waiting for the C/C++ IDE Package for M5 to be built. In the meantime, we do have the bits up on the CDT Galileo update site for you to try. Just download the Eclipse Platform or SDK 3.5M5 and add the following URL as an update site:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/galileo

Most people will want the "Tools" feature in the "Main" group, which will give you everything you need to work with the gnu toolchain. And yes, the features say 5.1.0, but we're tricking the API tooling with that to keep track of API changes. We'll be 6.0 when we go out the door in June.

I've actually been using CDT 6 for some technical investigations I've been doing lately, the qemu source being one of them. One of the biggest issues with the CDT that we've been fighting forever has been taking projects that have been developed without an IDE, that don't have any real structure to them, bringing them into the CDT, and having our indexer parse and create useful search information for them. And this is especially bad if we can't figure out the include paths to find the header files needed to parse properly.

One common pattern we have noticed with the include path was where all the user specified include paths were actually folders in the workspace. Everything else came from the built-in include path. At the very least, if we could search the workspace when looking for header files that were unresolved, we could probably resolve them.

Well in CDT 6.0M5, that functionality if finally there (thanks, Markus!) and it works superbly! Many of the unresolved headers I saw in this one project I was looking at, which targeted many different OS's, were magically resolved, and features like Open Definition (F3) worked great. Sure, if you have multiple header files with the same name in your project, we may pick the wrong one to resolve, and there will still be issues if you don't specify external include paths, but it's huge step forward for CDT usability.

There are other interesting things in M5, including the Debug Services Framework which has moved from the Device Debugging project to the CDT and should become our "official" debug framework over time. You'll notice the major issue we have with having two debug frameworks when you go to launch (double the launch configs :( ), but we are working on a solution to that.

We're still making great improvements to the CDT as we go. Most of them are under the hood as the feature set we have is working quite well already. And there are still things to clean up, like our managed build system and the underlying build model and the need to integrate that with our debug models. But I know I'm a happy CDT customer myself, and I hope you get a chance to try out CDT 6.0 M5 and give us your feedback.

Eclipse in the Clouds?

I'm not going to say much with this one. I'll just refer you to the comments people are adding to Boris's blog entry on his work with Mozilla to get an experimental IDE running in a browser with an Eclipse-based server back-end. Is this what developers working in the embedded and desktop space are asking for? Not that I've heard. And neither do a number of the commenters on Boris's article. Some of them are putting it in much prettier words than I could say without getting into trouble...

That's why it is so critical for those of us in the Eclipse community who support such users to make sure Eclipse continues to work well and to improve in the areas that cause them pain. Is the future of enterprise development so different from desktop and embedded that it requires such radical architectures? Maybe so. If that's true, we need to hold our ground and ensure we don't get dragged down a path we can't be going.

An ARM on Family Day

It's "Family Day" here in Ontario, Canada, and while my one son is over at his buddy's house and my other son is watching game trailers and my wife is out for lunch with the girls, I'm sitting here enjoying the day off. I'm sure we'll do something family-ish later today...

Anyway, I just read about TI's new family of chips, the OMAP4. The big news is that this is the first time TI has jumped on ARM's multi-core bandwagon and the mixture of parts going into these SOCs is quite impressive. You have PowerVR's venerable SXG OpenGL ES 2.0 engine, image processing, and enough power to play 1080p video. As the TI guys says in the LinuxDevices.com article, this type of architecture really will start to blur the lines between smartphones and MIDs (and even makes me wonder about the set-top box market). It looks like we'll be seeing some pretty exciting products ahead.

Speaking of TI, I'm still looking at the BeagleBoard community-based development board kinda thing. The more I look into what the community is doing with it, I really see it's potential as a vehicle for learning embedded development. But I'm cheap, so my attention turned towards whether the qemu emulator could emulate the BeagleBoard so I can run it on my laptop. And apparently someone is working on it. But then I started doing the math. How much is my time worth? Versus forking out the $300 or so to get set up. Makes me think...

Mucking around with all this has led me back to my EclipseCon tutorial on integrating a cross-compiler toolchain for the CDT. I really want to show how easy it is to get up and running with qemu and a cross-compiler and the freely available embedded Linux run-time goodies all under the CDT as the IDE. And given all the hype about ARM and mobile, I think I'll go with ARM as the target CPU. Should be a fun 4 hours, which should be plenty of time to get at least a hello world running. I can't wait and I really hope you can make it too.

IANAL, BSD, GPL, LGPL, ABCs

Slashdot pointed me to this article by Bruce Parens aimed at clearing some of the air around using GPL and LGPL and commercially licensed product on the same device. Of course, the summary of the article is "Check with your lawyer" as it should be. But I hope it alleviates fears over the FSF licenses that I know people have.

I especially like the description of the motivation that open source developers use to license their software. BSD is a "gift" software license. The developer is giving it to you as a gift, do with it as you wish, just give him some of the credit. LGPL is "non-gift". And I get it. They essentially don't want you using their stuff for free unless you help with it. And then you have GPL, which falls into the category that they just don't want you using their stuff for free, unless you're doing your stuff for free too. This categorization puts a little bit of a human face on it, and I appreciate that.

This also made me think about our situation at Eclipse. It's very difficult to get third party software approved at Eclipse. I'd love to be able to host the GNU tool chain binaries along with the CDT to help new developers get started. Now, I am not a lawyer, but Bruce's article doesn't mention restrictions on distributing binaries, only the run-time requirements. Maybe I'm missing something there, and maybe lawyers are reading more into the license than what I see. So be it, they're professionally responsible for their opinions, I tend not to be.

But there is no mistaking it. Despite whatever legal issues surround open source software, it's popularity can't be denied, especially in the embedded world.

Beagle Board and Eclipse Distros

We had a meeting a few days ago amongst interested parties in an Eclipse IDE distribution for embedded. The idea would be to do something like I'm doing with Wascana which is supposed to make it easy for developers using open source tools, students especially, to get them up and running on Windows, and in turn showcase the features of the CDT in that environment. The idea of doing this for embedded would be to do the same for embedded systems developers and to show case the features of the DSDP project at Eclipse as well as CDT's embedded development support.

One thing I think we noticed quite quickly is the diversity of the embedded community at Eclipse. We have Web services applications for embedded, we have J2ME Java for embedded, we have deeply embedded systems like microkernels and DSPs that have no OS per se, and, of course, we have the more traditional RTOS systems. I think it'll be hard to showcase Eclipse support for all these things in one distro, and maybe it deserves it's a few such distros, or maybe we have RTOS versus not RTOS. It's an interesting initiative and I'm excited to see where it goes.

One of the platforms that came up in the meeting was the Beagle Board. Checking out their web site, it looks like an interesting target for hobbyist and student embedded developers. It's a cheap little board at around $150 US (a little more once you add the needed cables and a power supply to use it properly). The community there is working on getting the Angstrom embedded Linux distro running on the board and there are some cool videos of it working. Don't doubt it, this is being driven by Texas Instruments, who makes the chips for this board, so it's not purely a community driven project, but it looks like an independent community has formed and is running with it.

I think this would be a good choice to target an Eclipse for Embedded distro. I think a case could be made for qemu as well and the various CPUs and boards it emulates. And I assume you'd target Linux for these platforms. But then you open up the questions, which distro do you support, or do you make your own? And what about the other free or quasi-free RTOSes that have Eclipse support. At a minimum you need a cross compile and debug tool chain to integrate Eclipse with but what else would you need?

I get the feeling that this could turn into a pretty big project on it's own. Which, of course means it won't happen without a community behind it and maybe vendors to sponsor it. I'm interested in hearing your opinions on what this all should mean and what you would like to see in an open source Eclipse for Embedded IDE.

MinGW frustrations

Um, yeah, Wascana 1.0 keeps slipping. Work has been very busy leaving little time for me to work on it, but that should be clearing up in the next few weeks (I hope!). But as I did my testing for the release candidate of CDT 5.0.2, as I expected, I ran headlong into the gdb 6.8 issue that everyone seems to run into. I don't know how many people I see on my Feedjit log searching for: "gdb eclipse No source available for "ntdll!LdrAccessResource()". And I hope those people now find this blog entry instead.

The issue is that before gdb 6.8, there was no way to issue pending breakpoints using the MI protocol we use to talk to gdb. I think it was introduced in 6.7 from the CLI, but that doesn't help us. To support breakpoints in shared libraries, we need to keep retrying to set those breakpoints on every shared library load event. That worked for many years. But now, the break on shared library event in the MinGW gdb 6.8 really messes up the CDT. And it's mainly because it doesn't work in gdb any more.

So the solution is to add support for pending breakpoints, at least into the MinGW debugger target. But, alas, I think that's going to be a lot of work. And given I'm having trouble finding time to even get the p2 support for Wascana done, let alone dive into debug which I don't really have expertise on.

At any rate, the experience is so bad, I'm starting to think of holding off Wascana 1.0 until Galileo in June. I can make the p2 repo available so people can download the same thing I'm testing with. But until this debug issue is resolved, it's not an environment I'm happy to send out to the world.

That and there was an interesting conversation on the mingw users mailing list recently about the state of gcc 4.x for MinGW. I've lost faith that it's ready for prime time as well.

It's enough to make me wish we had a Windows debugger available and to complete our Visual C++ support (wink, wink, nudge, nudge to people who know who they are ;). For now, bear with me.

TV's are small, plus a little Clutter

So I was sitting watching my 40" HDTV the other day, and started thinking about why web browsing on a TV pretty much sucks, even with all the pixels you get at 1080i or what have you. And trust me, I tried it with our PS3 and other than watching YouTube videos, it's not a good experience.

But while I was sitting there on my couch (or sofa, depending on your English dialect) a pretty normal distance from the TV, I held my hands up to frame the size of the picture at arms length. Then lowering it to may lap, it struck me. The size of the picture isn't any bigger than a handheld gaming box, maybe slightly bigger than an iPod Touch (as I try to find one for my son's birthday on Thursday :( ).

The reality of the situation is that even with the higher pixel count, you still need to treat set top boxes as mobile, but not mobile, internet devices and entertainment units. And that especially goes for the UI. Don't try running GNOME on it, that's going to be brutal.

So I'm off taking another look at mobile devices and the user interfaces they present. The newest one is the 2.0 alpha release of Moblin, Intel's effort at a Linux distro for mobile internet devices and netbooks running their chips. The video in the LinuxDevices.com article is intriguing, and made me go look at what technology they were using to present their 3D animated GUI.

Well, it turns out to be another open source project called Clutter. They produce a library that abstracts away the grunge of OpenGL and OpenGL ES to build user interfaces. You create Actors that have images and such and declare their animation and event handling and then fire off into an event/display loop. You get pretty cool effects with not too much code.

Now, I have to pick at the choice of GTK as their paradigm mentor and, yes, if you're used to GTK programming, doing Clutter will be natural, but if you're like me and fell in love with the Qt and it's elegant use of C++, then you'll be a little put off. I did find a clutter-qt integration in their repo, so maybe you'll be able to do both in the future.

Someone once said, and I think he lived in Redmond, Washington, that there was no innovation in open source. This is a pretty significant counter to that. This project has been around for a while, sprouting out of the need to add GUIs on top of the new fancy 3D graphic chips appearing in handheld devices. They have a innovative and game changing solution. The just need people to discover them, and Intel, who also happens to be their new boss, is helping with that.

Can an LGPL Qt give C++ a lift?

Black Duck recently announced their top Rookie Open Source projects for 2008 which using a bit of a weird metric, revealed the top 10 open source projects that were created in 2008 that had the highest number of releases. More releases makes you good? O.K...

Anyway, the most interesting information from their news release was the stats they gathered on what programming languages these new projects were using. To the surprise of many, 47% of them were written in C (C Rules!). That was followed by 28% in Java and 20% in JavaScript. It's pretty interesting there was so much JavaScript usage. And again, these were projects that have just been created. But when you look at it, most open source projects target Linux, and by far the most popular language for Linux is still C.

One thing I noted, though, was that C++ wasn't even mentioned. It could be that they lumped C++ in with C, but I have my doubts. I rarely do see C++ in open source. The large open source game engines, like Ogre and Irrlicht as well as Firefox (of course), are in C++, and OpenOffice is written in every language imaginable including C++, but I see C way, way more.

[Watch out, bad segue ahead...]

I spent part of last weekend taking a deeper look at Qt, with its upcoming spanking new LGPL license. I have to admit I'm a GPL library bigot and kept away from Qt because of that, but boy do I regret that now that I've seen it. It's an incredibly complete C++ library for building apps of all kinds. And it has everything I've been looking at lately, WebKit, JavaScript (well ECMAScript but that's the same thing), and OpenGL, and incredibly smooth integrations between those and many more components.

So as Qt makes this transition, I have a feeling it's going to gain in popularity everywhere. And I think it'll show the power of C++ and pull a lot of the developers writing for the C-based GTK away. Heck even Ubuntu is thinking of switching to it for their mobile platform.

Kudos to Nokia for making this decision. I think it's going to pay dividends for them as developers take a fresh look at a great framework. Which, BTW, means there will be more developers working in the same environment that also happens to run on Nokia's phones ;).

J2ME? Why?

I was just reading the slides presented from the kick-off meeting of the Eclipse Mobile Industry Working Group. I believe this is the first working group at Eclipse and I think it's a great concept. Bring groups of companies together that are interested in the same or similar technologies and do some planning. Hopefully that will result in new investments in various Eclipse projects.

Anyway, one of the examples of work environments shown was for a J2ME developer. The first thing that jumped into my head, and of course I'm writing this entry without thinking more so I may come off a bit misinformed here but hey I'm just the dumb C++ guy, but who cares about J2ME any more? With the rich mobile development environments provided with Android, the iPhone, the new Palm Pre, and even Qt for mobile devices, why would you do J2ME development any more. Isn't there much more opportunity for greater riches writing apps for these new and wildly popular environments?

Anyway, feel free to comment and tell me the way it is. And I'm sure the J2ME people over in DSDP are the right people to do that ;), since they know that community. But I am curious about whether the J2ME community is still on the rise, or whether there is a migration happening to these new technologies.

Time to Get Qt?

Now this is interesting. I've mentioned a few times in my blog that the world would be a different place if Qt was given a free commercial friendly license, like LGPL. Of course when Trolltech was an independent company, that would have killed all their revenue. But now that they're owned by Nokia, I guess the time has come for them to make the change.

And I think this will open people's eyes to Qt. It's certainly a very rich framework giving pretty much everything you need to make a truly cross platform application, i.e. #ifdef free. And it's used in some very popular applications like Skype, Google Earth, and the VirtualBox manager. And, of course, it's the foundation of the Linux KDE desktop environment, which has it's devoted fans.

And again, being LGPL, I'd expect to see it used by more commercial applications. Heck, it will now pass my policy and I'll be able to include it in Wascana, and the SWT developers will also be allowed by their lawyers to write the port against it. Who knows...

But as I scout the horizon of desktop and mobile apps, I wonder if the apparent momentum away from C/C++ has become too great for this to make a significant splash, or will it just be a ripple. Maybe my head is too deep in WebKit these days and my view is getting tainted, but the web is slowly taking over. I guess the one thing Qt has going for it is a decent WebKit integration so maybe they can get the best of both worlds. Either way, it's definitely time for me to take a deeper look at Qt (and it's CDT integration, of course ;)).

Palm Pre and WebKit

I've been following the Palm Pre story a bit the last few days. While the technical details are still pretty sparse, it appears that one of my predictions for 2009 is already starting to happen.

My understanding, and I hope it isn't coming from sources who are also using the same technique to guess at the architecture of this thing, is that the UI for the Palm is rendered totally using WebKit. It appears that the applications for this device are written in JavaScript and use HTML and maybe WebKit's SVG support to render the graphics. Hell, maybe it's even using Dojo to make things look really sharp.

If this is true, then it's going to be a great test of how well this architecture works. I have my worries about how JavaScript scales and how easy it is to write traditional GUI apps, even handheld ones, using HTML as a rendering engine. But looking at the screenshots, it looks pretty awesome.

The other thing I notice is that there is a continuing trend of making it very difficult to build native apps that draw on the screen with these things. It started with JavaME in the "old days" and is continuing today with Google's Dalvik Java VM and now Palm's WebOS WebKit thing. They promise the power and openness of Linux and then shut the door. It's too bad, since a lot of these handhelds have 3D graphic acceleration in their SOCs, and you really need to go native to build a good 3D game or what have you.

I can't wait to see what the Pre SDK looks like, and whether developers buy into this architecture of GUIs based on web technology. And it'll be interesting to see how good the apps can be with it. But if they're as good as the prerelease demos, it's something to pay attention to.

Zune 30, Killed by Complexity

I first heard of it early New Years Eve, I guess. Hoards of Microsoft Zunes were committing mass suicide (a gruesome thought but the actual quote from the Slashdot article). Fears rose that some Y2K thing was happening, mind you things like that didn't happen in Y2K, at least not on this scale. Microsoft finally confirmed the issue as such though, a device driver hang on the 366'th day of a leap year. I'd love to see that code...

Well, thanks to the wonders of the internet, here it is! (I imagine this link will fall dead as soon as the Microsoft cronies make the rounds, as they should. It does have a Microsoft copyright). I actually found it through another blog where the guy put together a pretty good analysis of the problem.

The root cause? A brain fart. Either someone was in a hurry, or they couldn't handle the complexity of the algorithm once they started dealing with leap years. People blame testing for not testing all the paths. But, if you don't take the time to test all the paths, or don't have the skills to properly enumerate all the paths, testing isn't going to matter. At any rate, another great software engineering lesson learned for us all, just like the unhandled exception in the Ariane-5 rocket, except this one is recoverable and isn't as expensive (unless the Zune market share dives as a result, which could happen).

I spend a lot of my time these days working on software architectures and trying to come up with the most simple, extensible, and future proof. But none of that matters if you have code like this. And I've seen code like this all through my career. Hell, I've written some of it. But one thing I learned early from one of my great profs back at the U of S, was on code complexity. It is even measurable by counting the number of paths through your code. Complexity bad. Which implies that having more paths than you need is bad. As we see here, it becomes too difficult to test fully.

And that is certainly the case here. Too many 'if's. How do you convert days since 1980 into a time structure? Well in the Zune code (which is actually a common device driver in a number of Windows CE platforms), one of the paths leads to an infinite loop, when days is 366 and IsLeapYear is true. The author of the blog proposes a much simpler algorithm that works correctly but reduces the paths thus eliminating the bad one. I think you can make it even simpler.

One of my mantras is "I hate typing!". Of course it has nothing to do with typing (much). It's about producing simple elegant solutions to simple problems. Yes, Keep it Simple S(favorite ending here). Saves time. Saves money. Saves embarrassment. Saves your job. I'd hate to be the guy who wrote this code...

Predictions for 2009

I'm not usually one to make predictions. It's hard for me to tell the difference between a prediction and wishful thinking. But this article over at the Inquirer (still the best place to get an honest take on the industry along with /.) got me thinking about a couple of things I think are going to be important in 2009. So here we go...

2009: The Year of the GPGPU

This is more a continuation of a trend but the Inq article made some great points that I think will put some spotlight on general purpose programming with GPUs. The key one, is the recent standardization of a cross platform way of programming these things, OpenCL. ATI and nVidia have already signed up to provide OpenCL support for their chips and look for Intel's Larrabee platform to come with the same. I think there is still some software and hardware architectural things that need to be done to make GPGPU more efficient and easier to program. Look for LLVM (which needs an article on it's own) to play a role, as it already is with OpenGL, and look for one of the chip vendors to put a GPU on the memory bus shared with the CPU and make these things sing.

2009: The year of WebKit

Ok, yes, I'm playing it safe with these predictions. WebKit is already the base for Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and a host of Linux based browsers, so it already has a ton of momentum. The reason I think WebKit is going to the next level, is first of all the top of the class performance of it's new JavaScript VM (and I can't imagine why Google would continue with V8 in Chrome). But also, I am impressed with how easy it is to create your own WebKit based browser, and how easy it is to create a Linux based platform that uses WebKit as it's front end (launch X, launch a simplified WebKit shell in fullscreen, done). I expect to see a lot more mobile internet devices built this way. At the very least, it gives a reason for embedded developers to care about AJAX.

C++0x won't be C++09

I think that's a forgone conclusion but no one really wants to admit it yet. But look for the vote to finish this year at least. C++0x will be an exciting evolution of C++ into the next generation. No it doesn't have garbage collection, yet, but it does have smart pointers that do the job better if you use them right. C++0x makes it easier to do a lot of things, and the introduction of closures and lambda functions and expressions will breath some life into this stalwart of the software engineering community.

Well, that's it for now. If I think of more over the next couple of days I'll post them. There are a lot of things I hope will happen, but i'm not sure they will. But one thing is for sure, open source is here to stay and is becoming a core business model that companies still need to understand and learn to use effectively and I will continue with my work with Eclipse and Wind River to help figure that out and spread the word.

Have a safe and happy New Year! See you on the other side.

A look at WebKit

A few days ago, I was playing with Google's V8 JavaScript VM library and got it compiling with MinGW in Wascana. I submitted the patch to make it work but I haven't heard back. I guess it could be the Christmas break.

But one thing that struck me odd recently was an announcement that the next rev of Android would include WebKit's SquirrelFish Javascript VM. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising since SquirrelFish comes with Webkit. But then why is there ARM support (the CPU for Android) in V8? And if they are using SquirrelFish for Android, why don't they use the souped up SquirrelFish Extreme for Chrome? Especially since there are benchmarks showing it beating V8. I'm confused and can only chalk it up to Google being a big company and maybe the Android people don't hang out with the Chrome people.

Anyway, that got me looking into this whole WebKit business. I downloaded the latest nightly source build to my Debian Linux VM and after installing a boat load of packages needed to build it, I built it. I had heard the JavaScriptCore library which implements the VM was embeddable in C++ apps. The header files are there, but it looks like you actually have to embed the whole WebKit library to get at the VM.

That got me thinking back to an earlier idea I had. Use HTML with JavaScript as your main GUI framework. With Webkit, you can embed the whole browser into your application, and you can hook up new JavaScript classes to your C++ classes to provide scripting and to give access to them to the UI. Interesting to see how that would work in action.

I think I'm starting to figure out this whole JavaScript and C++ thing, with thanks partly to something a commenter said on a previous entry. Use scripting for quick turnaround, when you want to whip up a prototype or allow for easy extension of functionality. But use C++ for areas where you need to engineer functionality. Part of your architecture design is deciding what that means. And maybe something like WebKit might be the right platform to get you off the ground.

VirtualBox 2.1 and assorted Christmas Fun

Just some random thoughts on this Saturday after Christmas. My family and I had a good Christmas, despite a little "Fun with Autism" moment with my Autistic son, but it's all better now (patience is a key survival technique in our household). Yesterday was Boxing Day in Canada, which is a holiday here despite all the stores being open for your shopping pleasure. If you don't feel like going out, you are free to sit around, well, like boxes, which we did for the most part.

I'm spending a little time today while everyone is playing on the PS3 and various PCs around the house getting ready for my EclipseCon tutorial. I'm really looking forward to it. By the end of the tutorial, you'll walk away with Wascana which you use to build qemu, a little Debian Linux image running in that qemu, and a cross-compile toolchain and CDT integration that you also get to build to create apps for Debian from Windows (and maybe Linux). Lots of hands on and hopefully an appreciate of why the CDT is the first class cross-platform C/C++ development environment.

Before I get back into playing with qemu, it was cool to see a new version of the VirtualBox emulator come out, 2.1. It's a minor version increase but there are two significant features added. One, is 64-bit support on 32-bit platforms. This is critical for me and my installer work at Wind River, where I need to test and debug on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. I don't trust 64-bit Linux enough yet to make it my main Linux environment, not to mention downright fear of 64-bit Windows.

The other cool thing is more on my personal interest front. They have an initial release of OpenGL support. If you read this blog regularly, you'll know I have a dream of an open Linux-based game console/multimedia set top box. I'd like to try some ideas out on a Linux platform with 3D hardware without actually buying any and this is the first emulator to have OpenGL support.

Unfortunately, they only have Windows guest drivers at the moment but have promised Linux/X drivers soon. I can't wait, but it does lead me to drop my plans for working on OpenGL support for qemu. Instead, I really need to spend what little hobby time I have learning how to write an X window manager, using a cross-compile environment with the CDT, of course ;)

I could have had a V8, oh wait, I do

I've always been intrigued by programming languages and what makes them tick, and what is the best one for what situation. That's why Dave Thomas's keynote at ESE still has me thinking about the mix of JavaScript and C++. So much so that I spent a few hours this weekend while waiting out the snow storm to get Google's V8 JavaScript VM building under MinGW for Wascana. I think it would be an intriguing addition to have the VM DLL available for developers using Wascana. With a few changes, I have it building and passing the unit tests and I have a patch into the V8 project. I'll make V8 available in the Wascana 1.0 alpha in the next couple of days.

Now that I have it, I have to ask myself - what the heck do you do with it? I've thought about building wrappers for the wxWidgets library to let you build thick client apps in JavaScript. wxWidgets also comes with Wascana, and thick client apps is kinda what Wascana is all about (aside from dreams of using it for game development, which could also benefit from a fast JavaScript engine).

But it's not clear where one would draw the line between JavaScript and C++. Given a C++ library like wxWidgets, or SDL, or what have you, is it enough to wrap it with JavaScript and have the developer do everything in JavaScript. Or should JavaScript just be this thing on the side that allows for extensibility of some larger application written in C++.

It makes me wonder if I'm following some crazy idea that some madman sold me in a bar in Germany. Or maybe this is challenging me to give it deeper thought, to think about how scripting and native languages are supposed to mix. Where in all this is the sweet spot of architectural balance. Or is there one? Either way, it'll be on my mind over the Christmas holiday season.

Fun with FEEDJIT

I'm not sure if you noticed, or are reading this blog from one of the syndication sites it gets copied too (like Planet Eclipse, or the Wind River Blog Network). But if you check back to the original site and scroll down a bit, you'll see a new panel called the FEEDJIT Live Traffic Feed. I know people express concerns about web things following them, and if I get enough negative response to it I'll pull it off. But in the meantime, I'm spellbound by this feature.

I'm learning quite a lot about the audience for this blog. The traffic feed gives me the city that where the person was, which is spread throughout the world, as well as a hint at how they got to my site. A few people come directly, I guess from an RSS reader where they've subscribed one way or another (Thank you!). More often, though, people end up here based on google searches, and I get the snippet that they were searching for! Creepy, but very useful.

So what are people searching for that pulls up my site? Well a lot of it lately has been the topics I'm most interested in lately, and that's CDT for Windows development, including Windows cross to Linux. It's good to see the interest from the community on that and I am continuing working on Wascana 1.0 as I write this (SDL is building in the background). I also often get a few queries on the Subversion Eclipse plug-in wars (I hate both right now, go git!). And you get the odd one looking for help, like today's "eclipse CDT autocomplete crap" (yeah, it has issues if you're environment isn't set up).

Anyway, it's pretty interesting to watch, and it humbles me immensely to see people from around the world reading what I write, especially when the google search reveals they searched for me by name. But I love to write and share my thoughts and I really appreciate it when people leave comments. Whether I agree with them or not, I always learn something from what they put there. It's a lot of fun and I encourage everyone to do the same. There will always be someone out there interested in what you have to say.

Fun with my little VIA console

At the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose this year they handed out little VIA embedded EPIA systems to the attendees. I'm not sure everyone got one, but I was thrilled. It has a embedded VIA processor with a chipset that includes Unichrome 3D graphics, and also include a hard drive, ethernet, VGA, four USB ports, and audio in and out. It's a cool little unit.

I haven't done too much with it, but thinking about this Open Console concept (set top box with 3D graphics running Linux), I thought I'd try setting it up with some of the things I had in mind. I started by putting the Debian lenny installer onto a USB stick and installing from it. That was a little tricky until I reformated my USB stick and put syslinux on it properly. I installed enough packages to get X running with the openchrome driver for 3D graphics. glxgears ran pretty smoothly which gave me some hope I could actually use this thing to run games.

So I got adventurous and installed Nexuiz, an open source first person shooter. To my surprise, this and other open source 3D games are available from the Debian package repository. So a quick little 'apt-get' which brought down around 450MB of game, and I was off and running. We'll off anyway. I got about 20 seconds per frame, which makes it a little hard to even notice the thing was running.

Anyway, I tried a few other simpler games and they actually worked. I had to force myself to go to bed while hooked on billards-gl. It was fun. But I've slowly begun to realize that games built for the desktop aren't really ready to be played with only a joystick as you'd likely only have in a set top box scenario. So there would be work to be done.

I also started to understand first hand the commercial opportunity behind Linux, embedded Linux especially. Sure you can install a Linux distro and get a desktop environment up without too much effort. But try to do anything off that beaten path and you're in for a lot of work. If you can share in that work, fine. If you can pay someone to do it for you for cheaper than you could do, even better.

I also gave up on using this little VIA box for my play-totyping (hmm, new word). I need to start getting ready for my EclipseCon tutorial which will help me get back into the guts of qemu. Maybe I can do a little work there to bring GLX emulation to it, play time permitting, of course. Or maybe I'll shell out the $500 bucks to build a real system. Though playing in qemu would be funner...

Time for Distributed Source Control is Now

Imagine this scenario. You're part of a small team that's been following the CDT closely and have adopted it as the IDE for your commercial platform. You grab the CDT source at times convenient to your product deliver schedule and work on a local copy fixing bugs you find as you go through product testing. You're not a committer but you do submit patches from time to time and hope that the CDT team picks them up. But they're often busy with their own delivery schedules and the patches often grow stale and fall off everyone's radar.

So you live with your CDT fork and struggle every time you have to update to a new CDT version, so you don't do that very often. And since you're busy struggling in that environment, you really don't end up with time to get more involved with the CDT. You are a small team and you only have so much time in the day. You run into Doug once in a while at the Eclipse conferences and talk about what you do and promise you'll figure out some way to get more involved, but he knows your story too well and doesn't put much faith in it despite his appreciate for your intentions.

Sounds like I have experience with this, don't I. This scenario is too real and I'd bet is very common across all open source projects. Relying on CVS and Subversion at Eclipse with access controls limited to the select few committers makes it very difficult for those on the fringes to get more involved. It truly is a have/have not environment. The committers have it easy, checking in their changes whenever they want and those that aren't are struggling to keep up, or simply fork and go their own direction.

I've learned that the new Symbian Foundation as selected Mercurial as their source control system. Along with Linus's git, it's one of the new breed of distributed source control systems. These systems allow for multiple repositories and provide mechanism to pull and push changes between them. The introduction chapter of the Mercurial on-line book provides a great description of why this architecture works well for large globally distributed projects.

I invite everyone to read it, especially the Eclipse community. Because I think we need this kind of capability now. CDT needs an infusion of new blood and I know there are a lot of people who work with the CDT code base but have only a limited time to contribute back. If we had the infrastructure to better support them and make it easier to pull their changes into the CDT main line, and easier for them to keep up with everyone else's changes, it could be the formula we need to grow.

x86, the ultimate applet engine?

I need to watch out or people will start calling me a Google fan boy or something (well, too late). It seems everything they come up with lately grabs my attention. And I guess it makes sense, because they seem to be heading in a different direction than a lot of people, and more in a direction that appeals to me. First Android (open mobile handset), then Google Chrome (Webkit-based browser), then the V8 C++ friendly JavaScript VM, and now, Native Client.

If you haven't heard of it, it appears to be a Google research project into running secured native x86 code in a browser. Yes, we have tried that before with ActiveX and it was a security disaster. But the underlying need for high performance interactive web pages is pretty intriguing. If you could write browser applets in C++, why wouldn't you? I suppose...

I had to try it myself. The install instructions are for Firefox, but I dumped Firefox for Chrome a while ago. It's good that Chrome has some Firefox in it, because all I had to do was copy the plugins for Firefox into my Chrome Plugins directory (it's hidden in Local Settings, Application Data, Google, Chrome, Application, Plugins).

I was then able to go through their little demos and tests. They're cute and the Mandlebrot demo shows some of the power. There's also a demo of the open source SDL version of id's Quake. It's pretty complicated to build and I couldn't get it working on my Windows box (mainly because I'm Cygwin-free and it seems to need it). But it's an interesting idea, taking an SDL-based application and converting it to run in a browser (Native Client uses SDL to do audio and video). Maybe, they'll even expose OpenGL through SDL to the native code as well. That would be more interesting.

One thing though that burst my bubble with this whole experience were the results of the performance tests that they have. The C++ version of the tests were only marginally better than the JavaScript ones. I think that's thanks to the great job they've done with the V8 VM. If that's the case, I really wonder whether this stuff actually makes sense, other than porting old software rendered games to your browser, I guess. I need to stew on that one a little before buying into this idea.

A busy day for Khronos

My Khronos.org News feed filled up all of a sudden today. Looks like they've been busy and had a couple of announcements to make.

They released a new version of the 2D OpenVG spec. They added some APIs for text glyphing to make it easier to draw good looking text. I'm not sure anyone really uses OpenVG, especially when you are most likely to be drawing 2D in a web browser with Adobe Flash or SVG (and even then, most likely Flash). From the news release, this is probably most interesting to the mobile crowd.

The more interesting announcement for me was the release of the first OpenCL spec. OpenCL is a standard for running general algorithms on the newer GPUs in video cards. It'll also be ported to other multi-core systems like Cell and DSPs, but most likely you'll be using it with a video card. Of course AMD and nVidia were quick to announce their support for this spec, which gives it some immediate momentum.

OpenCL specifies a C-based language for parallel processing as well as APIs that drive them. Up until now, nVidia and AMD had proprietary solutions that didn't work cross platform. OpenCL opens the door to make parellel programming available to more and more programmers and I'm dieing to see what they'll do with it...

Wascana 1.0 in Alpha Testing

Well, that didn't take very long. I've spent a few hours building my special p2 artifact repository that manages installed files, including extracting them from an archive and deleting at uninstall time, along with it's associated p2 touchpoint that hooks it all up. It's not a lot of code and you can see it in CDT's CVS space (repo: /cvsroot/tools, module: org.eclipse.cdt/p2).

I've also created a generator that creates p2 repositories that use that touchpoint to install remote artifacts from various locations, mostly on SourceForge. Currently I only have support for the MinGW toolchain and the MSYS shell environment. I'll add libraries as I build them with the 4.2.3 compiler I'm using here. I'll start with SDL and also do wxWidgets and boost. We can always add more later.

It's working very well. Managed build picks up the mingw toolchain and uses it when you select the MinGW toolchain. MSYS doesn't work yet for Makefile projects but managed is usable now. And here's how:

1. Unzip the Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers anywhere you'd like on your machine. You can also start with any other Eclipse install as long as you have the CDT installed.


2. In Software Updates, expand out the tools/cdt/releases/ganymede site into CDT Optional Features and install the Eclipse CDT p2 Toolchain Installer feature. Allow Eclipse to restart to make sure things are initialized (I'm not sure if you really have to do this, I'm just paranoid).


3. Go back to Software Updates and add the Wascana repo site at http://wascana.sourceforge.net/repo. Install everything under the MinGW Toolchain category. This time you don't need to restart. You don't even need to apply changes.

Once you're done, you can go to the directory containing eclipse.exe and you'll see the mingw and msys directories there, ready to go. Well at least the mingw dir is, I still need to set up msys correctly to find the mingw compilers, but it is only an alpha :).

Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think. I'm pretty excited with how this is going. While creating this, a new version of the win32 API component came out and I added it to the repo and the Update... feature found and installed it. Very cool!

It's a very interesting path where this is going. The ability to incrementally add in libraries and update new versions of the components will be a great showcase on how p2 can manage more than just bundles. Not to mention help me build one heck of a Windows development environment based on the CDT and open source tools and libraries.

Linux Kernel Debugging with CDT

Just ran into this awesome tutorial on how to use the CDT for debugging the Linux kernel using qemu's gdb remote debug service that makes it work much like a standard hardware/JTAG debugger.

This was something I played with a while ago when I looked at adding hardware debugging support to the CDT as an optional service. And I believe Elena from QNX has continued on with that work and we should hopefully see it completed for Galileo (if not before that).

But it further solidifies for me how important qemu is as a tool in the belt of the embedded software developer. We've seen it as a key enabler for Android without which I'm not sure it would have achieved the momentum it has. I think there are still issues with it, and of course one I'm looking at is ease at adding new hardware emulation and 3D graphics support. But I think there is plenty of opportunity there and being an open source project, the door is open to help make that happen.

The Future of Wascana

For those that don't know, I've been working on the side on a complete open source IDE distribution for Windows called Wascana Desktop Developer. It includes the CDT and the MinGW tool chain and a handful of libraries that enable cross platform development. I did the original "beta" release over a year ago and have over 12,000 downloads to date. But it's getting long in the tooth and I really need to respin with Ganymede Eclipse/CDT and gcc 4.x.

The question I'm dealing with now is what Wascana should look like going forward. My Wind River team and I are just wrapping up a p2-based installer for our Wind River products that are similar to Wascana but on a much bigger scale and targeting our Wind River platforms. We've learned a lot about how to extend p2 to manage the install, update, and removal of archived binary files into an install tree.

I want to bring that similar experience to Wascana and have started working on an open source version of these extensions. I'm starting doing it as part of the CDT since I need to support CDT 5.0.x with it and want to release around Christmas time. Once I check it in, the p2 team can look and see if the want something like this and give feedback on changes that would be needed to get it into an upcoming platform release.

In the end, Wascana will mainly be a p2 repository that ensures you have all the plug-ins installed to get a working CDT for MinGW, and that will allow you to download and install the MinGW tool chain and libraries, either from their home locations, or from the Wascana SourceForge download area if I need to rebuild for whatever reason. Updates and new components would be done by adding them to the repository.

So the question becomes, do I need an old time installer for this, or would the community be happy simply downloading the Eclipse C/C++ IDE package and working with the Software Updates tool to get everything they need. I have a feeling people will still be looking for that single setup.exe download to set everything up. Then I need to ask whether laying down the bits is sufficient, or whether I need to do a p2 director thing.

The good news is that I sense MinGW is maturing. Despite having an unmanaged release cycle (and I do have a second source for the mingw gcc tool chain thank goodness), it looks like it's ready for prime time, at least for my little distro. Enough so, I'm giving up on Windows debug support. My focus is cross platform, and my time is limited and building a pure Windows debugger is hard and without a significant contribution it won't happen, so I'm not counting on it. Wascana will do just fine without it.