In case you didn’t hear John Duimovich, our Tools PMC lead, at the EclipseCon wrap-up, he declared that the CDT was reaching some sort of “uberness”. I had to look in Urbandictionary.com to find out what that means. “Far superior to all other things”? Well I wouldn’t go that far, ever. There are far superior things, like C++ itself 🙂 Oh and maybe the Eclipse community.

At any rate, it was a great week for the CDT. We had about 60 people brave late notice and a late timeslot to attend the CDT BOF. We also had a good number at my talk on the using the CDT on Firefox source. However the bright lights didn’t allow me to do a head count. All through the week, I was very encourage through people’s comments. It’s almost like, “Hey good thing the CDT, you guys have tough challenges given the language environment you have to deal with, but we trust you are going in the right direction. We’ll help where we can. Keep up the good work.” It is something the CDT contributor community should be proud of.

I was also very encouraged with commercial interest in the CDT. This is the source of most of the manpower contributing code to the CDT. According to my latest count, I should expect an additional seven committers over the next year, doubling our current size. This will go hugely towards allowing us to do some great things.

The best of the week came on Friday. As everyone else was meandering their way home, the CDT contributors decided to stick around and have a full day of meetings. There we closed off on 3.1 plans and took a good look at CDT 4.0 due out summer 2007. For me, anyway, it was like starting to see my dreams for the CDT come true. In addition to our plans for core model additions to help the parser deal better with build configurations, we now have plans for templates for project creation and beyond, an internal builder for MBS removing the need for make (this may actually land in 3.1.x), and JNI debugging, our uber holy grail.

With all that good news including the great new features for CDT 4.0 and the influx of new contributors, I am absolutely thrilled. It’ll be a big challenge to make sure we managed the growth and make sure we don’t stumble all over each other, but it’s a challenge that I relish in and one that may just lead us to some sort of “uberness”.