I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with the CDT since the day QNX proposed it to world back in 2002. It’s been a very interesting journey. In the early days, the CDT was almost a side project at Eclipse where a few vendors had a dream of building a great C/C++ IDE and tried desparately with the few resources we had to reach the bar that the JDT guys continuously raised and continue to raise on us. But in those days the people working on the CDT didn’t have a whole lot to do with the other projects at Eclipse.

Callisto has changed that in a lot of ways. First of all, just delivering at the same time as the other 9 projects opens up opportunities for working with them to bring their features to the C/C++ world. I’ve had discussions with TPTP with thier static analysis features built on top of the CDT. It’s still small but a start. And others will arise in the future I’m sure. But the biggest benefit was our tighter schedule with the platform where we became early adopters and were able to get bugs fixed before having to wait for a maintenance release. And the platform team was very eager to help us out.

For the CDT, even the fact that we knew about 8 months in advance when our delivery date was going to be was a huge benefit. Until then, the release dates for the CDT were at the whim of the vendors providing committers to the CDT as we tried to match vendor release plans with CDT release plans. It made feature planning very difficult (we even had a 4 month cycle once!). And we look forward to the next release in a years time which will give us the opportunity to put forward a great program and make the major version jump to CDT 4.0.

For me personally, though, it was just the opportunity to work together with the 9 other project leads and Bjorn, Ward and Ian from the EMO. These are great people and it was a pleasure to work with them towards this great common goal that even Mike said wasn’t possible. We proved them all wrong and have started a new era at Eclipse. And I hope you all enjoy the fruits of our labour, Callisto!