Eclipse Concepts

Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) for writing, debugging, testing and running programs. Eclipse can be used for program development in many programming languages. To customize Eclipse for a particular language toolkits are used. C/C++ development toolkit (CDT) is used to develop C++ programs in Eclipse.

Eclipse basic concepts are:

• workbench - is a collection of panels (called views) geared towards implementing programming tasks. CDT provides a C/C++ workbench.

• view - is a panel dedicated to a specific task. There are editor panel (to edit source files), console panels (to display compiler or program outputs), etc.

• perspective - a set of specially arranged views for the particular tasks. Two most important perspectives in CDT are C/C++ and debug. Switching between perspectives is very simple in Eclipse. As programmer switches between tasks he switches perspectives.

• project - a set of files that are developed jointly. A project compiles into a single executable. The simplest file only contains a single source file to be compiled. Nonetheless, a new project needs to be created for this file. A Project Explorer view (the left pane in C/C++ perspective of CDT workbench) lists all the projects in the workbench.

• toolchain - a compiler and other supporting tools that compile the source program into executable and help debug it. By themselves, Eclipse/CDT do not compile or debug the program. Instead, they use G++ compiler and gdb debugger which are part of GNU compiler collection (GCC) developed by the GNU Project. That is, CDT uses GCC toolchain. In Windows, the toolchain is further modified by CygWin - a unix-like environment. The toolchain is called CygWin GCC.