Instant IDEs: supporting new languages in the CDT

While Eclipse has greatly simplified the task of creating integrated development environments, creating a full-featured IDE can still take years. Fortunately, for a large category of languages—those that can be compiled with make and debugged with gdb—the task can be simplified greatly. By leveraging proposed multilingual extensions to the Eclipse C/C++ Development Tool (CDT), a modest IDE can be created in far less time. As a proof of concept, we have extended the CDT to support a gcc-based toy language (Eightbol); with the multilingual extensions in place, the Eightbol support code can be rewritten in its entirety in less than an hour. The same extensions have been used to implement version 3.0 of Photran, a full-featured IDE for Fortran. This work is being funded by IBM under the PERCS project. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.3 [Software Engineering]: Coding Tools and Techniques—program editors General Terms Languages, Language Tools, Integrated Development Environme...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ECLIPSE
• Authors: Jeffrey Overbey, Craig Rasmussen
• Keywords: ECLIPSE 2005, Full-featured Ide, Integrated Development Environments, Multilingual Extensions, Software Engineering