QNX Software Systems, the company leading the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) project on behalf of the Eclipse Foundation, has announced the development objectives set by the contributing members at the CDT Contributors Summit held last month.

The CDT team agreed upon several priorities for the next release of the CDT code base, including improved build management and debugging. A new indexer, called the Persisted Document Object Model (PDOM), will also be developed to improve system performance. The group will also work on making it easier for vendors to build commercial releases based on the CDT framework through finer grained componentization and more concise API documentation.

The conference accomplished the important goal of fostering interaction between the CDT and other Eclipse projects. Representatives from the Tools Platform Device project, the Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) project, as well as the Photran and Parallel Tools projects also discussed integrations with the CDT to enable easier third-party integration and tool migration between projects.

Over 20 companies participated in the three-day conference, representing the full ecosystem of C/C++ development tool stakeholders, particularly for the embedded and Linux development communities. Commercial OS and tool vendors, end-users, and third party "plug-in" or valued-added partners were in attendance, and included representatives from across North America and Europe.

"The CDT project is maturing, and the participation of such a wide cross-section of companies at the conference is a testament to the importance CDT plays in development systems for vendors and users of tools alike," said Doug Schaefer, project leader for the CDT. "We look forward to continued success in delivering a universal development platform for C and C++ tooling."