[cdt-dev] Some words from EclipseCon and the CDT summit

[Marc Khouzam <marc.khouzam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I meant to send this earlier, but you know how things are.  So better late than never.

I was lucky to attend EclipeCon again this year so I thought I'd post a few words for the CDT folks that could not attend.

EclipseCon was as dynamic as ever with lots of energy and interesting technologies.  In my case though, I wasn't able to attend a lot of presentations.  Not because of lack of interest but because there was so many CDT things going on.

We had the CDT summit on the Monday and Tuesday, and with 33 people signed up, we had the opportunity to discuss many topics.  I was not able to take very detailed minutes but I did jot down some of what was discussed here: https://wiki.eclipse.org/CDT/summitecon2014. Feedback is welcomed for the summit, either directly to me (marc.khouzam at ericsson dot com) or anonymously by logging in to the EclipseCon website and going to: https://www.eclipsecon.org/na2014/session/cdt-summit. We also enjoyed two sponsored dinners specifically for the CDT where we got to exchange face to face in a relaxed setting.  Thanks to Polarsys and Ericsson for being sponsors!

On the Wednesday, Andreas Olofsson, CEO of Adapteva, and I presented Multicore Debugging of the $99 Parallella board (16 cores).  This work was done by one of our own committers: Marc Dumais.  I feel it went quite well and the feedback was very positive.  I believe people are starting to realize that massively multicore debugging is not so far away!  1000-core chip is actually ready to be produced, it just needs the market demand to be stronger first. You can see the slides with loads of screenshots here: http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/presentations/CDTAndParallella_EclipseCon_NA_2014/index.html.

On the Thursday, Doug did a cool presentation on new Qt support and the planned enhancements for CDT: https://www.eclipsecon.org/na2014/session/getting-qt-eclipse-cdt-and-jsdt. I hope the slides will be put up soon (hint hint ;-))

We also had a CDT Debug poster displayed on Thursday morning, across from a Linux Tools Tracing poster, so that was a cool duo.

Other cool things to note is that both PayPal and Walmart are now using the CDT for their development.  The main challenge they both faced was that their host is Windows while their build machines are Linux/Unix.  Also, custom parsers where needed as well as tweaks to Codan to support SQL statement embedded in C code.  But the message was clear: CDT is helping them be much more productive.  I'm hoping to see the slides posted here: https://www.eclipsecon.org/na2014/session/edit-compile-debug-45-million-lines-unix-c-code-any-box-using-eclipse and https://www.eclipsecon.org/na2014/session/printf-was-our-debugger.

It was nice to see committers face to face, Doug, Sergey, Jeff, Teodor, Leo and myself.  And some Linux Tools and PTP committers also: Jeff (again :-)), Roland, Alexandre, Xavier, Greg and Beth.  And also it was great to see some of our contributors in person.

The conference was very well organized and although I can't speak for others, I can tell you it was a week well spent for me.

But now its time to get back to our normal routing and the list :) 

Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen.

Marc