[cdt-dev] Toolchains in CDT

["Lott, Jeremiah" <jeremiah.lott@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey CDT folks.  TimeSys is looking at moving our product line over to
CDT 2.0.  One of the things we have in our CDT-based product that is not
in core CDT is the concept of "toolchain".  We would like to have this
concept added to CDT 2.0 (assuming the group agrees).  Right now we
essentially use toolchains in three places.  Our managed build allows
you to choose a toolchain to indicate what cross-compiler to use.  Our
debug panels allow you to choose a toolchain indicating what gdb
executable to run.  The binary parser uses the toolchain to figure out
what executables to use for addr2line, c++filt, objdump, etc.  In each
of these cases the user can choose toolchain from a drop-down list that
contains applicable toolchain installed on the machine.  The contents of
the list could be statically defined by the user or dynamically
discovered.  A "ToolchainFactory" extension point would be added so that
vendors could add plugins to do dynamic discovery for their own
platforms.

Do people think this would make a good addition to CDT?  The idea would
be to make it more generic than just the three areas I mentioned above.
A toolchain could indicate what operations it supports so that an area
of CDT can easily search for toolchains appropriate to a particular
operation (and let the user choose from that filtered list).  I've
actually been working on a proof-of-concept with the CDT managed build
system if people are interested in seeing it.  Thanks,


  Jeremiah Lott
  TimeSys Corporation