[cdt-dev] Minutes from call today

[Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey gang,

Here are the slides I presented today. Let me know if you have trouble accessing them.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Bmvw0M4fqtuUjzczCMJZ5m4jsvXRNH_2

Of the things I can remember, and please feel free to add to this or correct me:

The Ericsson gang again raised concerns about the gdb debug adapter being a part of the CDT project worried about whether that will make contributors from companies that compete with CDT hesitant to join us.

I will raise my point again on this. The whole reason to I want to do this is to give my customers choice in IDEs to support different workflows but with the same C/C++ IDE features. I would be happy if companies like Microsoft joined in our effort on the adapter, just like I was happy when Wind River joined us. CDT has always had an environment of co-opetition, competitors working together for the common good. And, the whole idea behind this new architecture that was introduced by Microsoft is to do even more of that. I don't think it will be an issue, but if it does come up, we'll work through it.

Concerns were also raised about clangd and thoughts of forking it. I firmly believe the main objective is to contribute everything we can upstream to clangd. At the same, if ever there was a need, we need to be able to add features that may not be welcome upstream. I have verbal confirmation that we should be able to fork clangd in CDT, but I need to double check on that.

Concern was also raised about clangd in environments it doesn't have support for, in particular with gcc. From my experience it works well if you add in the necessary Triples and toolchain info into llvm and clang, and use the clang headers for the rest of the the built-ins. I have that working with QNX and ESP32. I'll write that up in a blog post and we can discuss where to take it.

The IP policy Type A versus Type B came up. As we go forward, I think we really need to move to a Type A (i.e. license compatibility check instead of a full IP check on dependencies) so we can take advantage of all the great libraries out there. CDT doesn't have many dependencies at the moment so I don't think that will be a big change. I do have an action to hook up with Wayne Beaton and work through the setup of all this and will report back.

I'll put together a demo of clangd and the gdb debug adapter working in our three main IDE's of interest, Eclipse IDE, VS Code, and Theia. I showed the clangd side at EclipseCon. I will also post instructions on how to set that up so everyone here can share the message with their communities of interest.

On the cool side, William is looking at the new MBS and suggested using Xtext to build a language server for the build files. That would be awesome to see!

I'm sure I'm missing a lot, but again, please let me know if I missed anything.
Doug.