On the second day of Callisto,
my Eclipse committers gave to me
CDT and proof that Eclipse isn’t just a Java IDE
And a Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) for free.
Ok, the song and verse is lame, no more 😉 Here’s another quote from a committer (notice that these guys aren’t all from IBM ;p)
The CDT brings to Callisto a development environment for writing C and C++ programs. The JDT sets a high bar as far as Eclipse IDEs go and we are constantly working in catch up mode. For Callisto, the CDT provides an Editor with all you’re regular Text Editor features such as language specific keyword highlighting and content assist. It also provides an index of the user’s code to provide search and code navigation features. As well, there is a framework for integrating build tools and debuggers to complete the edit, build, debug cycle. In this release, we’ve focused on a faster, more scalable indexing framework as well as a flexible build system that allows for per resource builds as well as a new experimental internal builder that eliminates the need for MAKE files. As well, we have the beginnings of a framework for supporting additional compiled languages such as Fortran by the Photran project, and hopefully more such as C# and Ada in the future.
— Doug Schaefer, CDT Lead, QNX Software Systems
Another interesting note about the CDT is that it is scalable to handle large projects. I recall at EclipseCon hearing all about how the CDT can do such marvels as work with the Mozilla codebase (I think a flash demo is in order Doug ;p).