IBM Software Development Kit for PowerLinux

Over the years, many software engineering activities have relied on the automated support afforded by tools. In order to maximize the benefits provided by tools, they are often retrofitted to pre-existing development environments that enable them to capitalize on facilities provided by compilers, debuggers, and profilers. Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), for instance, comprise a myriad of tightly-knit tools (i.e., plugins) designed to boost programmer productivity. Due to the advantages that such integrated environments have brought to the mainstream, they have become a de facto standard to implement complex software systems. Eclipse is one of the most widely used contemporary IDEs. In order to integrate a set of mainstream C/C++ development tools along with several in-house IBM tools, we have used Eclipse a as basis to bring together a SDK comprising the necessary tools to assist in the development and analysis of C/C++ programs for Power Architecture, namely, the IBM^® Software Development Kit for PowerLinux™. In this paper, we describe the approach we used to port such tools into plugins, the main technical hurdles we ran into during the porting, the workarounds we used to deal with such issues, and some quirks of the target platform (i.e., Power machines).