First of all, I'd like to extend
my congratulations to the CDT 1.0 team for putting together a pretty
comprehensive IDE for C/C++ development. It certainly surpasses my
expectations and I've started to use it on some C++ projects I have on the
go. You've certainly set a high standard for development going
forward.
To that end, I am happy to
announce that we at Rational Software are ready to help with contributions to
the CDT. There are two main areas where we think we can help
address:
- Automated build. We would
like to provide a mechanism that allows users to work with their C and C++
projects without having to manually create makefiles. This mechanism
must support build tools from many sources and, at the least, support
generation of appropriate makefiles. It should also be extensible to
allow other types of build tools (e.g. ant) and potentially an internal
build mechanism that calls tools directly.
- CDOM. We have some
expertise in parser technologies and extensive experience in object
models. We would like to lend this expertise to the development of a
complete C/C++ parser and code object model that allows us to reach the same
level of functionality as the JDT, especially with code assist, searching,
refactoring support, etc. This is certainly a challenging area that,
if we get right, will bring some exciting features to the CDT.
We will be pleased to work with
the CDT community in development in these areas as well as to help out in
others areas where we can. We will put more detailed proposals out for
comment over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you have any
comments, questions, concerns, please let me know and I. as Rational's
technical lead on the CDT, will make sure they are
addressed.
We are very excited here to be
joining the CDT development team and being a part of a project that will
certainly change the landscape of the C/C++ development
community.
Doug
Schaefer
Technial Lead
Rational - the software development
company
Ottawa (Kanata), Ontario, Canada
