9.4.0 Release Review

Type:

Release

State:

Successful

End Date of the Review Period:

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Project:

Eclipse CDT™ (C/C++ Development Tooling)

Release:

9.4.0

Description:

CDT 9.4 introduces more work with the Core Build system, progress with C++ language support, and general clean up in debug and the build console.

API Certification:

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues:

The Core Build System is progressing nicely. We upgrade the CMake integration to Preview. Experimental support for Autotools and Makefile projects have been added. Also added is the ability for Users to play a manual role in toolchain selection including manually adding in new toolchains. This was shown at EclipseCon with support added for WebAssembly without writing a plug-in.

As Core Build matures, and with Managed Build largely unmaintained, we have started planning for Managed Build's deprecation. Integrators adding in new build integrations should look at Core Build.

Security Issues:

None.

Non-Code Aspects:

User Documentation is old and unmaintained. Work is needed to document the new UI for Core Build and Debug.

We containue to ensure strings are externalized to enable internationalization.

Blogging about the new features in CDT Core Build will be done on Doug Schaefer's blog, cdtdoug.ca. KitchwaCoders have been blogging about debug.

Conforms To UI/UX Guidelines:

Not verified

Usability Details:

The Launch Bar and Core Build continues to be the focus for user experience improvements around build and launch. The Lauch Bar enables automatic creation of launch configurations and Core Build enables automatic creation of build configurations. Editing of build and launch settings is currently done with the configuration (middle drop down) edit (the gear) dialog.

Work continues on improving Build Console performance to improve usability when large numbers of build messages are produced during a build.

End of Life:

Nothing is added to the End of Life list for this release. Be aware that we are looking at deprecating Managed Build in a future release.

Standards:

Work continues on supporting the latest C and C++ standards with work this release supporting C++14 and some of the new C++17.

Communities:

Our mailing list, cdt-dev, continues to be the main communication channel.

The forum is quite active with questions from users. Our response from the committer communty has improved lately with both Jonah and Doug contributing help.

Doug and Jonah and Tracy continue to blog about CDT in their respective blogs.

An embedded tools summit was held at EclipseCon along with an number of talks from CDT committers.