[cdt-dev] Assembly As a First Class Citizen

["Robert Norton" <rnorton@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear CDT Dev,

We use assembly heavily to develop for an embedded platform and have
found the CDT's default assembly editor a bit lacking. We've already
made some improvements and submitted a patch or two (e.g. see bug 160278
<https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=160278>, WIP), but there
are still a lot of improvements which could be made. Many of which stem
from the fact that assembly is not treated in the same way as CDT's
other supported languages.

For example, in the process of trying to implement content assist in the
assembly editor I came across the following oddity:

In CCompletionProcessor2.computeCompletionProposals(...) it is assumed
that the call to workingCopy.getLanguage() will return non-null. In the
case of assembly language this is not the case due to the fact that
there is no org.eclipse.cdt.core.language extension declared in
plugin.xml for assembly. Although its possible to work around this
problem, my question is this:

What work would be necessary to add assembly as a first class CDT
citizen (implementing Ilanguage)? What would be the implications /
advantages?

(OK, so that is really two questions).

Also I notice in org.eclipse.cdt.core's plugin.xml that there was once
such a language declared for the CLanguage extension point, but it is
commented out. Is this because the CLanguage extension point is now
deprecated?

Any help and advice much appreciated.

Robert

--
Robert Norton
Software Engineer, DSL Unit, Broadcom UK