I posted this tweet a couple of weeks ago and thought I’d explain it a bit more.

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 a means of sharing in a common effort to build a great C/C++ IDE. We didn’t have a huge team and we knew that many platform vendors were in a similar situation. By working together, we all benefit. And for many years it worked and we now have the embedded industry’s most popular IDE that we all should be proud of.

But times they are a changing. As I blogged last year around this time, web technologies are becoming the platform of choice, not just for web, but with the help of Electron, for the desktop as well. We can not discount the popularity of Visual Studio Code and the ecosystem that has quickly developed around it. And with shared technologies like language servers, the door is being opened to choice like we’ve never had before.

So as I was inferring from my tweet, it’s time to take stock of where we are and where we are going. I was encouraged with the discussions I had at EclipseCon around the future of CDT. I’ve done what I can to help keep things rolling but at the end of the day the community leads the way and I need to be honest with myself and my customers and go where they go.