eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/content/en_article1.php - gerrit/www.eclipse.org/community - Git at Google

 <?php
 /*******************************************************************************
  * Copyright (c) 2015 Eclipse Foundation and others.
  * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
  * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
  * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
  * http://eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
  *
  * Contributors:
  *    Eric Poirier (Eclipse Foundation) - Initial implementation
  *******************************************************************************/
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 <h1 class="article-title"><?php echo $pageTitle; ?></h1>

   <p>The Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling, the CDT, has been around for
     a long time and is used by an incredible number of developers, but
     we don’t talk about it that much. That’s why we were excited with
     the opportunity to show off a little of what we’ve been working on
     in this newsletter. To start, here’s 10 thing you probably didn’t
     know about the CDT that you probably should.</p>

   <h2>1. C and C++ isn’t dead yet, far from it</h2>
   <p>If you are a follower of the TIOBE Programming Community Index, you
     would know this already. C and Java have been neck and neck for a
     long time as the two most “popular” languages in our industry. A lot
     of people find it hard to believe that C keeps such a high profile,
     but when you consider that pretty much all operating systems are
     still written in C and that the vast majority of Linux apps are
     still written in C or C++ and embedded devices are almost
     exclusively C and C++, it adds up.</p>

   <p>Even the mobile industry still relies on C and it’s relatives C++
     and Objective-C for apps. Apple’s iOS, of course, uses Objective-C
     as it’s standard language. Android has support for native C/C++
     applications, especially for games. And the new BlackBerry 10 uses
     C++ in combination with the Qt framework for it’s main environment.
     Mobile devices demand good performing apps that are good on power.
     It’s still hard to beat C when trying to get the most out of those
     little CPUs.</p>

   <p>The Internet of Things (IoT) is certainly raising big headlines
     these days, and with good reason. Of course, for us in the embedded
     industry, IoT isn’t really anything that new. A lot of the devices
     we’re talking about as the Things already exist and are programmed
     in C.</p>

   <p>But as the internet grows up, you start to see how you can leverage
     all the data that we’ve been generating on those devices, to analyze
     that data and control those devices from anywhere in the world. It’s
     a very compelling story and I expect some really interesting
     libraries and applications written in C and C++ running on those
     devices. And it will be exciting to see how with Eclipse, we can
     build an IDE that lets you create these systems in multiple
     languages all throughout the stack.</p>

   <h2>2. CDT is 12 years old</h2>
   <p>I often think back to that first CDT summit in the summer of 2001
     where it all started. It was held in a conference room back at QNX’s
     old headquarters in south Kanata, Ontario, Canada. I was there as
     part of the team from Rational and I was yearning to get “down and
     dirty” in IDE business after years of playing in the “ahead of it’s
     time” modeling space. I was pretty sure that a C/C++ IDE for Eclipse
     would be pretty popular and the team from QNX was looking for a
     community to help with the one they had built. It was a perfect
     match.</p>

   <p>12 years later, we’re still going strong. Lots of committers and
     contributors have come and gone, but the mission is still the same:
     build a community driven IDE that helps make the lives of developers
     who work on C/C++ applications better. We have all been proud to
     participate in that mission.</p>

   <h2>3. CDT had 2 million downloads in Juno</h2>
   <p>That’s an incredible number, isn't it? I remember the first time we
     gathered download stats, I was thrilled to see it in the 10s of
     thousands. It was a sign of success. But year after year the number
     grew and grew. Juno SR-1, that SR being by far the most popular of
     the three releases we do a year, almost hit 1 million. Add in the
     half a million each for the June release and SR-2, wow. I’m very
     proud of that number.</p>

   <p>I also follow Stack Overflow and various social media outlets for
     people’s comments and questions about the CDT and I see a lot of
     sentiment that we’re heading in the right direction. A famous game
     engine architect tweeted a few days ago that he was finding that
     Eclipse with CDT is perfectly usable these days. He seems to think
     it’s today’s hardware, however I know that’s because of all the
     performance optimizations we’ve done. There’s no doubting we still
     have usability issues and have trouble handling some of the more
     unstructured projects out there, but we have come a long way.</p>

   <h2>4. CDT has a full C/C++ parser and index database</h2>
   <p>OK, so yeah, this is my baby. After the first CDT summit, our team
     at Rational took on the job of building real C and C++ parsers and
     an index database for the CDT. In our minds, it is very important
     that in order to build good tooling in an IDE, you had to have deep
     knowledge of the user’s code. Source navigation, being able to find
     the definition of a symbol, or to find all references to a function,
     and so on, as well as good context aware content assist are key
     values that a text editor simply isn’t going to give you for C++, at
     least not without a lot of set up and other tools.</p>

   <p>And trust me, while it is valuable, it sure is hard to build. I
     remember senior management laughing a bit at us trying and there
     have been a lot of doubters and a lot of doubts by ourselves that we
     could pull it off, but when you’re editing files, not noticing the
     index running and then have control click (Open Declaration) work in
     the code you just wrote, we got it right.</p>

   <p>It took a lot of hard work and the CDT frankly wasn’t very good in
     this area for the first half of it’s life. But since I rewrote the
     indexer when I joined QNX in 2005 by minimizing the amount of
     parsing it had to do, and maximized the use of heuristics, I’ve been
     pretty happy with it. And as my fellow CDT contributors continue to
     work on improving accuracy while managing the trade off with
     performance, it keeps getting better. And that includes adding in
     new language features as the C++ standard picks up a renewed drive
     towards modernization with C++11 and the upcoming C++14.</p>

   <h2>5. CDT has a static analyzer called Codan</h2>
   <p>The CDT parsers started life to support the source navigation
     features and content assist. But as we realized what we had built, a
     pretty fast and accurate parser, we started to dream bigger.</p>

   <p>Those of you who work on C/C++ projects know it can take quite some
     time for a build to complete. Even incremental builds, which
     minimize compilation, still have to go through a lengthy link phase
     to hook up all the symbol references to create a working executable.
     That’s a long time to wait to see if you have errors in your code,
     and it’s an even longer time to see if you’ve fixed them properly.
     Wouldn’t it be great if we could use the CDT parsers to let you know
     as you type that your code has errors in it. JDT can do this since
     it has a real compiler in it. Are the CDT’s parsers that good.</p>

   <p>Well the answer is yes and no, but it does work in a lot of cases.
     We can pick up on a most syntax errors and have started adding
     checkers to validate the semantics of the code as well. And that
     includes the ever troublesome for C programmers, the accidental
     assignment in a condition, = instead of ==, which is syntactically
     valid, but hardly ever what you want to do and something that almost
     every C programmer has been burned with.</p>

   <img
     src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/images/octarticle1.1.png"
     alt="code analysis" />
   <br />
   <br />

   <p>And as we continue our work at improving the accuracy of the
     parsers and kill off the false positives which are inevitable in
     static analysis tools, we think this is a huge reason why users
     would want to use the CDT, and something few other C/C++ IDEs do
     well if at all.</p>

   <h2>6. CDT does refactoring and other cool tricks</h2>
   <p>You thought semantic analysis was hard for C and C++. How about
     refactoring? One of the things that makes refactoring hard for our
     languages is the macro preprocessor that takes your source code and
     converts it into something potentially very different. Given that
     refactoring works at the source level, the preprocessor is it’s
     number one enemy.</p>

   <p>But if you minimize the use of it and keep your code clean, you can
     take advantage of the refactorings we’ve added over the years. Of
     course, you can never have an IDE these days without rename
     refactoring, including in-line rename refactoring just as JDT does.
     But we have others, like extracting constants which gives numbers a
     name, critical for embedded programming. And we have the ability to
     generate code, including generating your traditional getters and
     setters and implementing methods defined in a class.</p>

   <h2>7. CDT has unit test support</h2>
   <p>If you’re a Java programmer, you are very likely familiar with
     JDT’s JUnit support. CDT has something similar in a familiar UI.</p>

   <img
     src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/images/octarticle1.2.png"
     alt="run configurations" width="600" />
   <br />
   <br />

   <p>It starts with a launch configuration which supports three popular
     C++ Unit test frameworks: Google Tests, Qt Test, and Boost.Test, and
     it is extensible so we should see others added in the future.
     Generally these launch the application under test and gathers the
     results by watching the programs output. It then formats the results
     and presents it in a Unit Test view.</p>

   <img
     src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/images/octarticle1.3.png"
     alt="unit test" width="600" />
   <br />
   <br />

   <h2>8. CDT is very interested in Qt</h2>
   <p>Qt is a C++ framework that is quickly becoming the cross platform
     standard for writing C++ applications for both desktop and mobile
     devices. It has a rich set of APIs and does a lot to simplify C++
     programming, especially with memory management.</p>

   <p>It also offers some added semantics around asynchronous programming
     with the ability to declare methods as slots or signals. You can
     connect a signal emitted from one object to a slot implemented for
     another. You often see this in UI frameworks and network
     programming, but the added syntax that Qt provides, through some
     magic macros and a special preprocessor, makes it simple to work
     with.</p>

   <p>However, that special syntax needs support from your IDE and we’ve
     started adding that to the CDT. We’ll also be adding support for
     Qt’s build system, qmake, which generates makefiles and helps manage
     the special build needed to run it’s preprocessor. Our intention is
     to ensure Eclipse and the CDT is a good alternative IDE for Qt
     developers and allow them to take advantage of the great ecosystem
     Eclipse provides.</p>

   <h2>9. CDT is very interested in LLVM/Clang</h2>
   <p>It’s been one of those long-time dreams of supporting development
     for Apple’s operating systems using the CDT. It’s been hard to get
     off the ground because of the need to support Objective-C. Syntax
     and keyword highlighting is one thing, but writing a parser and
     adding support in the index has been an insurmountable hurdle.</p>

   <p>The LLVM compiler stack and their C/C++/Objective-C compiler Clang
     has opened up possibilities that just weren’t available to us with
     standard gcc environment. First of all, LLVM and friends have a
     BSD-style license. gcc is GPL. For Eclipse projects, that a
     monumental difference. It means we can potentially integrate with
     LLVM technologies without affecting our license.</p>

   <p>And one of those technologies we are keenly interested in is an API
     for the Clang parser. The possibility exists for us to use Clang and
     maybe even it’s backend LLVM as an alternative for CDT’s internal
     parsers and indexer. And that would not only give us support for new
     languages, like Objective-C, but also give us access to Clang’s
     static analysis capability.</p>

   <p>It’s exciting to think of the possibilities, but we all realize
     it’s a huge amount of work and right now, we don’t have the
     community resources to pursue it. But we hope to start with baby
     steps, first learn how to use this new pot of gold, and then see if
     there’s a clean path to bring it in. And we hope that along the way,
     we’ll find others interested in the same idea.</p>

   <h2>10. CDT is at the core of a really interesting Eclipse community</h2>
   <p>One of my earliest EclipseCon memories was a meeting that I got
     invited to to discuss two competing proposals for Fortran support in
     Eclipse. Fortran you say? Once I got to meet and hang out with these
     guys (and get them to work together), I soon learned of another
     community of developers I had forgotten about since leaving
     university, high performance computing. These guys get to play with
     the coolest toys, the big iron, those massively parallel machines
     you hear about in the Top 500 Supercomputers list.</p>

   <p>Well, these guys need an IDE and Eclipse is perfect for them. And
     the cool thing is that they use CDT as a core piece for a lot of
     their tooling. If you ever get a chance, check out the Parallel
     Tools Project, and check out how they’re handling debugging an
     application that spans 100,000 processors. It ain’t easy!</p>

   <p>The other key project that the CDT works with is the Linux Tools
     Project. In a lot of ways, Linux has driven the C/C++ open source
     tools business. Without it, the gcc compiler and the gdb debugger
     would never have been the industry standards they are today.</p>

   <p>Well, there also happens to be a lot of other tools that Linux
     provides. The Linux Tools Project focuses on providing access to
     these tools through Eclipse including Valgrind run-time analysis,
     Gcov code coverage, Gprof system profiler, and LTTng system tracing.</p>

   <p>And, of course, most programs written for Linux are written in C or
     C++ so there is a huge overlap between the communities. So much so,
     that as Linux tools become popular on Windows and Mac, such as we
     saw with the autoconf build tools, we have been able to migrate that
     functionality down into the CDT and made available to the larger
     audience.</p>

   <h2>There’s no end in sight</h2>
   <p>You always wonder how long a project can go on for. After 12+
     years, there is no sign that the CDT is finished. Far from it. As
     long as C and it’s family of high performance, close to the metal
     languages continue to find work in the systems of today, the CDT
     will be there to support the developers who get to play there.</p>

 <div class="bottomitem">
   <h3>About the Authors</h3>

   <div class="row">
     <div class="col-sm-12">
       <div class="row">
         <div class="col-sm-8">
           <img class="author-picture"
         src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/images/dougs75.jpg"
         alt="Doug Schaefer" />
         </div>
         <div class="col-sm-16">
           <p class="author-name">
         Doug Schaefer<br />
         <a target="_blank" href="http://www.qnx.com/">BlackBerry/QNX</a>
       </p>
       <ul class="author-link">
         <li><a target="_blank" href="http://cdtdoug.blogspot.ca/">Blog</a></li>
         <li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/dougschaefer">Twitter</a></li>
         <li><a target="_blank"
           href="https://plus.google.com/111863048261633151082/posts">Google
             +</a></li>
         <!--$og-->
       </ul>
         </div>
       </div>
     </div>
   </div>
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	<?php
	/*******************************************************************************
	* Copyright (c) 2015 Eclipse Foundation and others.
	* All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
	* are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
	* which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
	* http://eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
	*
	* Contributors:
	* Eric Poirier (Eclipse Foundation) - Initial implementation
	*******************************************************************************/
	?>
	<h1 class="article-title"><?php echo $pageTitle; ?></h1>

	<p>The Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling, the CDT, has been around for
	a long time and is used by an incredible number of developers, but
	we don’t talk about it that much. That’s why we were excited with
	the opportunity to show off a little of what we’ve been working on
	in this newsletter. To start, here’s 10 thing you probably didn’t
	know about the CDT that you probably should.</p>

	<h2>1. C and C++ isn’t dead yet, far from it</h2>
	<p>If you are a follower of the TIOBE Programming Community Index, you
	would know this already. C and Java have been neck and neck for a
	long time as the two most “popular” languages in our industry. A lot
	of people find it hard to believe that C keeps such a high profile,
	but when you consider that pretty much all operating systems are
	still written in C and that the vast majority of Linux apps are
	still written in C or C++ and embedded devices are almost
	exclusively C and C++, it adds up.</p>

	<p>Even the mobile industry still relies on C and it’s relatives C++
	and Objective-C for apps. Apple’s iOS, of course, uses Objective-C
	as it’s standard language. Android has support for native C/C++
	applications, especially for games. And the new BlackBerry 10 uses
	C++ in combination with the Qt framework for it’s main environment.
	Mobile devices demand good performing apps that are good on power.
	It’s still hard to beat C when trying to get the most out of those
	little CPUs.</p>

	<p>The Internet of Things (IoT) is certainly raising big headlines
	these days, and with good reason. Of course, for us in the embedded
	industry, IoT isn’t really anything that new. A lot of the devices
	we’re talking about as the Things already exist and are programmed
	in C.</p>

	<p>But as the internet grows up, you start to see how you can leverage
	all the data that we’ve been generating on those devices, to analyze
	that data and control those devices from anywhere in the world. It’s
	a very compelling story and I expect some really interesting
	libraries and applications written in C and C++ running on those
	devices. And it will be exciting to see how with Eclipse, we can
	build an IDE that lets you create these systems in multiple
	languages all throughout the stack.</p>

	<h2>2. CDT is 12 years old</h2>
	<p>I often think back to that first CDT summit in the summer of 2001
	where it all started. It was held in a conference room back at QNX’s
	old headquarters in south Kanata, Ontario, Canada. I was there as
	part of the team from Rational and I was yearning to get “down and
	dirty” in IDE business after years of playing in the “ahead of it’s
	time” modeling space. I was pretty sure that a C/C++ IDE for Eclipse
	would be pretty popular and the team from QNX was looking for a
	community to help with the one they had built. It was a perfect
	match.</p>

	<p>12 years later, we’re still going strong. Lots of committers and
	contributors have come and gone, but the mission is still the same:
	build a community driven IDE that helps make the lives of developers
	who work on C/C++ applications better. We have all been proud to
	participate in that mission.</p>

	<h2>3. CDT had 2 million downloads in Juno</h2>
	<p>That’s an incredible number, isn't it? I remember the first time we
	gathered download stats, I was thrilled to see it in the 10s of
	thousands. It was a sign of success. But year after year the number
	grew and grew. Juno SR-1, that SR being by far the most popular of
	the three releases we do a year, almost hit 1 million. Add in the
	half a million each for the June release and SR-2, wow. I’m very
	proud of that number.</p>

	<p>I also follow Stack Overflow and various social media outlets for
	people’s comments and questions about the CDT and I see a lot of
	sentiment that we’re heading in the right direction. A famous game
	engine architect tweeted a few days ago that he was finding that
	Eclipse with CDT is perfectly usable these days. He seems to think
	it’s today’s hardware, however I know that’s because of all the
	performance optimizations we’ve done. There’s no doubting we still
	have usability issues and have trouble handling some of the more
	unstructured projects out there, but we have come a long way.</p>

	<h2>4. CDT has a full C/C++ parser and index database</h2>
	<p>OK, so yeah, this is my baby. After the first CDT summit, our team
	at Rational took on the job of building real C and C++ parsers and
	an index database for the CDT. In our minds, it is very important
	that in order to build good tooling in an IDE, you had to have deep
	knowledge of the user’s code. Source navigation, being able to find
	the definition of a symbol, or to find all references to a function,
	and so on, as well as good context aware content assist are key
	values that a text editor simply isn’t going to give you for C++, at
	least not without a lot of set up and other tools.</p>

	<p>And trust me, while it is valuable, it sure is hard to build. I
	remember senior management laughing a bit at us trying and there
	have been a lot of doubters and a lot of doubts by ourselves that we
	could pull it off, but when you’re editing files, not noticing the
	index running and then have control click (Open Declaration) work in
	the code you just wrote, we got it right.</p>

	<p>It took a lot of hard work and the CDT frankly wasn’t very good in
	this area for the first half of it’s life. But since I rewrote the
	indexer when I joined QNX in 2005 by minimizing the amount of
	parsing it had to do, and maximized the use of heuristics, I’ve been
	pretty happy with it. And as my fellow CDT contributors continue to
	work on improving accuracy while managing the trade off with
	performance, it keeps getting better. And that includes adding in
	new language features as the C++ standard picks up a renewed drive
	towards modernization with C++11 and the upcoming C++14.</p>

	<h2>5. CDT has a static analyzer called Codan</h2>
	<p>The CDT parsers started life to support the source navigation
	features and content assist. But as we realized what we had built, a
	pretty fast and accurate parser, we started to dream bigger.</p>

	<p>Those of you who work on C/C++ projects know it can take quite some
	time for a build to complete. Even incremental builds, which
	minimize compilation, still have to go through a lengthy link phase
	to hook up all the symbol references to create a working executable.
	That’s a long time to wait to see if you have errors in your code,
	and it’s an even longer time to see if you’ve fixed them properly.
	Wouldn’t it be great if we could use the CDT parsers to let you know
	as you type that your code has errors in it. JDT can do this since
	it has a real compiler in it. Are the CDT’s parsers that good.</p>

	<p>Well the answer is yes and no, but it does work in a lot of cases.
	We can pick up on a most syntax errors and have started adding
	checkers to validate the semantics of the code as well. And that
	includes the ever troublesome for C programmers, the accidental
	assignment in a condition, = instead of ==, which is syntactically
	valid, but hardly ever what you want to do and something that almost
	every C programmer has been burned with.</p>

	<img
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/images/octarticle1.1.png"
	alt="code analysis" />
	<br />
	<br />

	<p>And as we continue our work at improving the accuracy of the
	parsers and kill off the false positives which are inevitable in
	static analysis tools, we think this is a huge reason why users
	would want to use the CDT, and something few other C/C++ IDEs do
	well if at all.</p>

	<h2>6. CDT does refactoring and other cool tricks</h2>
	<p>You thought semantic analysis was hard for C and C++. How about
	refactoring? One of the things that makes refactoring hard for our
	languages is the macro preprocessor that takes your source code and
	converts it into something potentially very different. Given that
	refactoring works at the source level, the preprocessor is it’s
	number one enemy.</p>

	<p>But if you minimize the use of it and keep your code clean, you can
	take advantage of the refactorings we’ve added over the years. Of
	course, you can never have an IDE these days without rename
	refactoring, including in-line rename refactoring just as JDT does.
	But we have others, like extracting constants which gives numbers a
	name, critical for embedded programming. And we have the ability to
	generate code, including generating your traditional getters and
	setters and implementing methods defined in a class.</p>

	<h2>7. CDT has unit test support</h2>
	<p>If you’re a Java programmer, you are very likely familiar with
	JDT’s JUnit support. CDT has something similar in a familiar UI.</p>

	<img
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/images/octarticle1.2.png"
	alt="run configurations" width="600" />
	<br />
	<br />

	<p>It starts with a launch configuration which supports three popular
	C++ Unit test frameworks: Google Tests, Qt Test, and Boost.Test, and
	it is extensible so we should see others added in the future.
	Generally these launch the application under test and gathers the
	results by watching the programs output. It then formats the results
	and presents it in a Unit Test view.</p>

	<img
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/images/octarticle1.3.png"
	alt="unit test" width="600" />
	<br />
	<br />

	<h2>8. CDT is very interested in Qt</h2>
	<p>Qt is a C++ framework that is quickly becoming the cross platform
	standard for writing C++ applications for both desktop and mobile
	devices. It has a rich set of APIs and does a lot to simplify C++
	programming, especially with memory management.</p>

	<p>It also offers some added semantics around asynchronous programming
	with the ability to declare methods as slots or signals. You can
	connect a signal emitted from one object to a slot implemented for
	another. You often see this in UI frameworks and network
	programming, but the added syntax that Qt provides, through some
	magic macros and a special preprocessor, makes it simple to work
	with.</p>

	<p>However, that special syntax needs support from your IDE and we’ve
	started adding that to the CDT. We’ll also be adding support for
	Qt’s build system, qmake, which generates makefiles and helps manage
	the special build needed to run it’s preprocessor. Our intention is
	to ensure Eclipse and the CDT is a good alternative IDE for Qt
	developers and allow them to take advantage of the great ecosystem
	Eclipse provides.</p>

	<h2>9. CDT is very interested in LLVM/Clang</h2>
	<p>It’s been one of those long-time dreams of supporting development
	for Apple’s operating systems using the CDT. It’s been hard to get
	off the ground because of the need to support Objective-C. Syntax
	and keyword highlighting is one thing, but writing a parser and
	adding support in the index has been an insurmountable hurdle.</p>

	<p>The LLVM compiler stack and their C/C++/Objective-C compiler Clang
	has opened up possibilities that just weren’t available to us with
	standard gcc environment. First of all, LLVM and friends have a
	BSD-style license. gcc is GPL. For Eclipse projects, that a
	monumental difference. It means we can potentially integrate with
	LLVM technologies without affecting our license.</p>

	<p>And one of those technologies we are keenly interested in is an API
	for the Clang parser. The possibility exists for us to use Clang and
	maybe even it’s backend LLVM as an alternative for CDT’s internal
	parsers and indexer. And that would not only give us support for new
	languages, like Objective-C, but also give us access to Clang’s
	static analysis capability.</p>

	<p>It’s exciting to think of the possibilities, but we all realize
	it’s a huge amount of work and right now, we don’t have the
	community resources to pursue it. But we hope to start with baby
	steps, first learn how to use this new pot of gold, and then see if
	there’s a clean path to bring it in. And we hope that along the way,
	we’ll find others interested in the same idea.</p>

	<h2>10. CDT is at the core of a really interesting Eclipse community</h2>
	<p>One of my earliest EclipseCon memories was a meeting that I got
	invited to to discuss two competing proposals for Fortran support in
	Eclipse. Fortran you say? Once I got to meet and hang out with these
	guys (and get them to work together), I soon learned of another
	community of developers I had forgotten about since leaving
	university, high performance computing. These guys get to play with
	the coolest toys, the big iron, those massively parallel machines
	you hear about in the Top 500 Supercomputers list.</p>

	<p>Well, these guys need an IDE and Eclipse is perfect for them. And
	the cool thing is that they use CDT as a core piece for a lot of
	their tooling. If you ever get a chance, check out the Parallel
	Tools Project, and check out how they’re handling debugging an
	application that spans 100,000 processors. It ain’t easy!</p>

	<p>The other key project that the CDT works with is the Linux Tools
	Project. In a lot of ways, Linux has driven the C/C++ open source
	tools business. Without it, the gcc compiler and the gdb debugger
	would never have been the industry standards they are today.</p>

	<p>Well, there also happens to be a lot of other tools that Linux
	provides. The Linux Tools Project focuses on providing access to
	these tools through Eclipse including Valgrind run-time analysis,
	Gcov code coverage, Gprof system profiler, and LTTng system tracing.</p>

	<p>And, of course, most programs written for Linux are written in C or
	C++ so there is a huge overlap between the communities. So much so,
	that as Linux tools become popular on Windows and Mac, such as we
	saw with the autoconf build tools, we have been able to migrate that
	functionality down into the CDT and made available to the larger
	audience.</p>

	<h2>There’s no end in sight</h2>
	<p>You always wonder how long a project can go on for. After 12+
	years, there is no sign that the CDT is finished. Far from it. As
	long as C and it’s family of high performance, close to the metal
	languages continue to find work in the systems of today, the CDT
	will be there to support the developers who get to play there.</p>

	<div class="bottomitem">
	<h3>About the Authors</h3>

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	<div class="row">
	<div class="col-sm-8">
	<img class="author-picture"
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/october/images/dougs75.jpg"
	alt="Doug Schaefer" />
	</div>
	<div class="col-sm-16">
	<p class="author-name">
	Doug Schaefer<br />
	<a target="_blank" href="http://www.qnx.com/">BlackBerry/QNX</a>
	</p>
	<ul class="author-link">
	<li><a target="_blank" href="http://cdtdoug.blogspot.ca/">Blog</a></li>
	<li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/dougschaefer">Twitter</a></li>
	<li><a target="_blank"
	href="https://plus.google.com/111863048261633151082/posts">Google
	+</a></li>
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