[news.eclipse.dsdp.vpp] Minutes of meeting 28 April 08 : Topic CDT

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Present
Mark Burton (GreenSocs)
Antony Berent (Arm)
Doug Gaff (Windriver)
Doug Schaefer (Windriver)
Chris Dhensier(sp?) (CoWare)
Bernhard Sommer (Infineon)
Eric Marschner (Cadence)
Laurent Gerard (ST)
Hampus Edvardsson (Virtutech)
Gary Delp (LSI)

Introduction:

Mark Burton introduced the meeting. He started by explaining GreenSocs, 
which is an open source project that tries to provide all the 
infrastructure needed by the ESL community.  Within that wide scope, 
connectivity to Eclipse is one aspect of the GreenSocs mission. As far 
as these calls are concerned, Mark will be co-ordination and facilitating.

VPP's role is to provide the aspects of Eclipse that are required by ESL 
and not catered for by other projects within Eclipse.

Todays call is about "CDT"  - there will be a follow-up call on the 
specific issue of IPXACT, where we imagine a lot of effort will be 
centred within the VPP project.

SPECIFIC CDT PROBLEMS:
There problems were initially raised sometime ago:

- "Windows Visual Studio tool-chain support for the CDT"

Today there is experimental build chain support. Requests have been made 
to MicroSoft... so far with no response. There is currently No "debug" 
support. Debug API's are there, but not used for Visual Studio.

Microsoft has commercial APIs it uses for VisualStudio. That requires a 
VSIP (Visual Studio partner program) license which costs  and probably 
doing anything with it in open source violates the licensing agreement.

There are public APIs available but we're not sure how well they work 
yet. I think there is promise there but we need contributions from the 
community to make it happen.

Also, there is some experimentation with Windows debug support in the 
DSDP-TM project, but it's not a product yet. The question from the group 
was, why is this required - for instance, one could use the GNU 
toolchain for windows (though V C++ is probably the preferred solution). 
We are talking about moving people off V.S onto Eclipse.... so why is 
there a need for V.S. Having said that, of course, Eclipse would be open 
to contributions...



- "Improved pre-indexing support for the CDT"
This does exist in the CDT - Need feedback to understand if the tools in 
CDT 4.0 are sufficient, or defective, or do not cover the required use case.

assuming pre-indexing means you have a large code base ahead of time, 
and will run, as a command line job "off line", a "pre-indexer": when 
you import a project it reads the pre-indexed code.

So,
mode 1: index of header files - i.e. SystemC or model libraries.
mode 2: a large code base, where "users" may share a large index -
this does not exist today. Users can not use a common code base and
index file. - But it is not clear that this is the case for ESL
development?

- "Improved C++ template support for the CDT indexer"
This is being actively looked at. Indexer has been re-architected, 
which lost templating. Recently work has stated to get this put back. 
The "test" is to support the STL library. Boost will be another template 
library that will need improved CDT support as well.

The group  suggested SystemC  and TLM could be a test case. Google is 
making some improvements, but the level of activity remains  relatively 
low, so this needs co-ordering and further contributions.

This is an activity where the ESL community could help.

- CDT support for vendor library "toolkits"
Not sure what this means?


- Improved facilities for Eclipse GUI testing This is clearly an issue
- there are other projects like SWT Robot - and some commercial products 
too.
No specific eclipse project (apart from some work in tptd)

Debugging tools for GUI testing would be useful for anyone... Again, 
this is an area where ESL vendors could help.



dates for next meeting:
2nd june

Topic: IPXACT and Eclipse

Antony Berrent went over his list of topics (available on the vpp reflector)

One issue which was addressed was the issue of where "IPXACT editors" 
should sit within Eclipse. It was decided that their natural home would 
be VPP  - however this  should not be attempted until after the next 
train release,  which is expected sometime in June.

Doug and Mark will discuss trying to progress this forward.


Cheers

Mark.