Last Nine Years

Exactly nine years ago today, on June 1 2006, I have joined CodeSourcery, as the first Eclipse engineer. I had zero Eclipse and Java experience, but knowing KDevelop and GDB was deemed sufficient. Look like I did passably well, and for my part, I’m happy to have played a small part in a huge change to open-source embedded development tools.

Every current GDB tutorial for embedded development say to just load your binary to the target. It was my first big project, in 2006, to make it work, since GDB knew nothing about flash memory. I’ve ended up teaching it about memory maps, translating memory writes into flash erase and programming operations, throwing together support for some ColdFire chip, and finally adding a single checkbox in the UI.

GDB non-stop mode was entirely done by CodeSourcery. In this mode, each thread can be independently stopped, and examined, while others are running. There I’ve contributed to asynchronous processing of commands and reworking breakpoint machinery. We’ve made GDB handle breakpoints in constructors and function templates, implemented tracepoints, and different flavours of OS awareness. I was also part of initial prototyping for Python scripting.

On Eclipse side, we made just as many changes, but had less luck submitting them upstream, so describing them is similar to a research paper -  it tells what’s possible, but you’re on your own if you want an implementation. Still, we’ve made Eclipse scan for hardware debug device automatically, modified project wizard to include debug settings and create projects you can immediately debug, implemented a IDE editor for hardware board descriptions, and modified register view to effectively deal with thousands of memory-mapped registers. Among that, I did manage to create and submit a new Eclipse CDT view - OS Resources - that shows tables of different objects on the debugged system.

Between Eclipse and GDB, there’s a small interface called GDB/MI. It also saw significant changes, becoming less stateful, adding new notifications (so that Eclipse view don’t have to explicitly pull the data on each stop), and improving variable access methods.

In November 2010, CodeSourcery was acquired by Mentor Graphics and our product went on to became Sourcery CodeBench, the decision based in part on progress made by open-source tools in the previous years. Understably, a lot of work after that went into integration with other products - including Mentor’s hardware debug devices, profiling tools and Mentor Embedded Linux. Personally, I went on to lead the IDE team, learning how to run a full distributed team across 12 time zones. We were less active in the open-source for a while, but gradually returned, and one of the biggest recent contribution is a product installer based on Eclipse P2 we’ve announced in 2014.

And then technology went full circle. The most recent open-source contributions from CodeSourcery team are patches for LLDB-MI, a bridge between LLDB and Eclipse.

In 2006, I’ve joined CodeSourcery in part because at the previous position, there was no longer anything to learn. Over years, I worked with the best people in each area: Daniel Jacobowitz and Pedro Alves on GDB,  Carlos O’Donnel on Glibc and GCC, Mikhail Khodjaiants on Eclipse and of course Mark Mitchell, CEO who wrote a C++ frontend once. It was a great experience. Now, it's time to learn something new. See you there!