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