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.