Recently, I was inspired by Ben Eater’s YouTube serices where he built a CPU using 7400 logic chips on breadboards. I had thoughts of doing the same, but I wanted it to albe to demo well to kids at Maker Faires, play games on a VGA display using serial game controllers, for example. Well as the idea grew, the design was all of a sudden going to take 20 breadboards and probably more. That’s like $200 worth of boards. Meanwhile, I had seen articles on how hobbyists were building soft CPUs that did things like emulate the venerable Commodore Amiga. It’s really only recently that FPGA boards for t ..read more

EclipseCon for me is many things. It’s a chance to meet face to face with my fellow CDT contributors. It’s an opportunity to run things by one another that may feel awkward over the mailing list or conference calls. It’s a chance to get a good feel for what’s happening in the rest of the Eclipse IDE and the rest of the Eclipse ecosystem. And it’s a chance to hang out with my brothers and sisters in the community and have a few laughs over a few beers going too late into the night but ready to get to work the next morning. It’s the best. This year was special for another reason. The Eclipse IDE ..read more

We’re coming up on the 10’th anniversary of one of my favorite EclipseCon memories, Eclipse Summit Europe 2008. Something about staying up until 5 a.m. local time with a bunch of messed up Canadians and Europeans who just didn’t want to go to bed that make an event legendary. What made that special was probably the audience with a legend himself, Dave Thomas, who arguably started this all and who stayed right with us. But it was his keynote, “Next Generation Embedded Software - The Imperative is Agility!” that I drew a lot of inspiration from. I can barely remember what it was about but he see ..read more

Looks ridiculous, doesn’t it. There is a method to my madness though. Stick with me… I make it no secret how enthusiastic I am about Visual Studio Code as an IDE platform. I have often commented on my desire to start building tools using web front end technologies (and not necessarily web back ends). I even prototyped an “Eclipse Two” that was built on Electron directly. In the end, the Microsoft Zurich team, who also happened to be former leaders at Eclipse, created something similar with a huge community and ecosystem of extensions and I jumped on the bandwagon. Being a good code editor and ..read more

The Photon release of the Eclipse C/C++ IDE now includes support for a number of different build systems. CMake is one of the most popular build systems with open source projects so it was an obvious candidate. The Eclipse CDT project has been working on CMake support for a few years and now it’s ready for wider adoption. One of the open source projects using CMake is the Espressif IoT Development Framework, ESP-IDF, an SDK for their inexpensive and highly featured system on a chip, the ESP32. It is widely popular with hobbyists with boards available from a number of vendors. Though CMake supp ..read more

When I came back to QNX over six years ago (wow, it’s been that long?), they offered a choice of one of the the three main environments. I was excited to see what all the hype was about and picked Mac. I really enjoyed it. It provided a great blend of user experience with the power of Unix and the shell underneath. The trackpad on the MBP is amazing. It’s under rated how much a productivity enhancer that is. But eventually that machine got old and beat up and it was time for a new one. I had my fun with the Mac, but it’s not what’s used by many of the users of the tools I build. In the embedde ..read more

Going Serverless Well, after a couple of years running my cdtdoug.ca server on AWS and the couple of years before that on DigitalOcean, I finally got tired of managing my own server and have moved my blog over to Github Pages. I’m using the default Minima template to get me going, but reading through the Jekyll docs, it looks like I’ll have some fun tweaking my own setup the way I want it. For the first 8 years of my blogging life, I had hosted it on Google’s Blogger. But being the foolhearty geek craving to learn new things, I got my own little server in the cloud and moved my blog there, fir ..read more

I attended the online CheConf this week and was impressed by a few of the sessions. Now don’t get me wrong, I still have reservations over the practicality of having your IDE in the cloud, at least in the embedded space where engineers tend to be more conservative. Certainly running tools inside docker containers makes sense and I believe all IDEs, cloud and desktop, need to be able to interface with them and Jeff from Red Hat is making good progress with that in the CDT. So we’re not so different. What did impress me from the sessions, though, is the progress we’re starting to see with advanc ..read more

When I started working on C code many years ago, I was a big fan of emacs. It didn’t have the weird modes that vi did. You just typed and code showed up. emacs has a rich extension system, if you don’t mind writing LISP code, and soon we had fancy features such as running builds and navigating through compile errors. There’s even a gdb integration that gives you what you need to debug your program. And then along came ctags and we started getting source navigation. But what was good for C started to fade with C++. We also started bringing in code coverage and profiling tools and even modeling ..read more

I posted this tweet a couple of weeks ago and thought I’d explain it a bit more. 2018 is going to be a defining year. Either it'll be the end and a new beginning, or it'll be a revival. Not sure I control either path other than my desire to not walk it alone. — Doug Schaefer (@dougschaefer) December 21, 2017 I wrote it shortly after posting the final bits for the CDT 9.4 release and was starting to think about my plans for 2018. And certainly the current state of Eclipse tools projects including the CDT has been weighing on my mind. When QNX started the CDT project, we embraced open source as ..read more