Doug Schaefer
QNX Software Systems

The embedded development industry has long needed an extensible, multi-platform IDE that can be used by all developers on many different types of projects. This paper describes a solution: Eclipse, together with its official C/C++ tooling environment, featuring core extensibility mechanisms and plug-ins for a variety of development activities. The extensibility of the Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling (CDT) environment platform allows for easy integration with existing build and debug tools, as well as easy integration of existing projects. Building a large, feature-rich IDE is a prohibitive undertaking for most tooling vendors, other than large platform vendors such as Microsoft. Eclipse provides governance, licensing, and intellectual-property policies that can enable vendors to pool their resources and build software that that a single vendor might not be able to create.